ON BORROWED TIME (1939)

Crotchety Lionel Barrymore catches Death in his apple tree . . . and won’t let him down in this tough-minded bit of whimsy taken from Paul Osborn’s sturdy play. Along with Bobs Watson as his adoring Grandson, Barrymore lays it on pretty thick in the film’s first half as ‘Mr Brink’ (in the alarmingly calm & reasonable form of Cedric Hardwicke) spirits away the boy’s parents, Grandma and then tries for Granddad. That’s when Death gets tricked into that backyard tree and Takes a (forced) Holiday. That’s also when the film, which has threatened to tip over from sentiment, starts to make its case. Not only does Death/Brink find his voice and make a neat defense for himself (very GBS)*, but just as crucially, Henry Travers (Capra’s Clarence the Angel) playing Barrymore’s worried doc, finds just the bone dry sceptical tone needed to make the fable come to life. Barrymore, no slouch when nudged off his hammy tricks, rises to the occasion, pulling back as the story moves toward a series of clever dramatic reversals, ending with a quietly shocking, sobersided finale that would never have made it past a modern focus group. Harold Bucquet megs without resorting to a lot of spectral effects, helped by unusually rich tech work from lenser Joseph Ruttenberg (check out the stream-of-conscience tracking shot he gives mean Aunt Demetria) and from Franz Waxman who supplies heaps of atmosphere with his background score.
DOUBLE-BILL: A 1957 Hallmark Hall of Fame version had Beulah Bondi repeating as Grandma, plus Ed Wynn & Claude Rains in for Barrymore & Hardwicke. It even had the real Margaret Hamilton as mean Aunt Demetria, played here by Hamilton manqué Eily Malyon. Alas, it’s not available. Instead, try Brad Pitt in MEET JOE BLACK/’98 which is an updated version of DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY/’34, something of a companion piece to this. (DEATH once came on a deluxe BLACK edition, but is now hard to find.)
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Fitting, since George Bernard Shaw pegged Hardwicke as his second favorite actor.

COUP DE GRACE / DER FANGSCHUSS (1976)

It’s tough to be a romantically fatalistic, self-destructive/self-deluded, sexually disturbed Countess in the best of times! Just try playing these psycho-sexual mental games as WWI closes down on your family’s crumbling Baltic estate while the Russian Red/White Civil War spills over your property. Choosing sides & choosing partners barely leaves time to see that the love of your life may be more interested in your handsome officer brother than in you. No wonder Margarethe von Trotta (who stars & co-scripted for her husband/director Volker Schlöndorff) is on edge. It sounds perfectly fascinating, and offers a superb physical look in sharply etched b&w, but it adds up to less than the sum of its ill-fitting parts. And that includes the wildly over-parted von Trotta who comes off as a modern neurotic. The rest of the cast is quite effective, including a fabulous bit of stunt casting in ancient cabaret artist Valeska Gert as a half-mad Aunt. Otherwise, the film's shortcomings in psychological detail and finding simplistic answers to philosophical conundrums are all too typical of Schlöndorff.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:François Truffaut & Jeanne Moreau set the modern cinematic standard for this sort of thing with JULES ET JIM/’62. But should your interest run toward the military endgame of the Russian Civil War, Miklós Jancsó’s CSILLAGOSOK KATONAK/ THE RED AND THE WHITE/’68 is a tremendous find.

HORS LA LOI / OUTSIDE THE LAW (2010)

Writer/director Rachid Bouchareb tackles the next chapter of the Algerian Independence Movement (French Division) after his INDIGÈNES/DAYS OF GLORY/’06. That film focused on the Algerian Nationals who fought with the French in WWII. Now we watch three displaced Algerian brothers reunite in France after being separately radicalized in jail for political crimes; serving with the French army in Vietnam; or thru hustling/pimping in the streets outside shantytown. The drama rises & falls as the brothers respond (enthusiastically, reluctantly, guiltily) to the demands of the FLN political terrorist movement and to the grim tactics taken by the police to stop the violence. Bouchareb aims for something on the order of ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS/’60 meets THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS/’66 and it largely plays out like a gangster pic (note the poster). But the film has much the same strengths & weaknesses of his previous look at the period, with an odd weightless quality to the tragic collateral damage while he’s busy force-feeding us potted history. The mix is both impressive . . . and indigestible.
DOUBLE-BILL: As noted above, you may want to watch DAYS OF GLORY first.

WALK DON'T RUN ((1966)

Cary Grant made a graceful career exit playing matchmaker to Jim Hutton & Samantha Eggar in this pleasant nonentity, a posh remake of THE MORE THE MERRIER/’43 with the setting moved from WWII housing-crisis D.C. to 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The original saw Jean Arthur talked into doubling up in her small flat with grandfatherly Charles Coburn and then tripling with the addition of hunky Joel McCrea. A tremendous hit in its day, the film has aged oddly with Coburn’s mischievous turn as an addled cupid now looking more creepy than altruistic. What does hold up is the significant heat generated between Arthur & McCrea. In this remake, the relationships all go topsy-turvy since Grant retains an edge of sexual promise unknown to cuddly-bear Coburn, while Hutton’s Jimmy Stewart drawling & Eggar’s Mary Poppins primness implodes too politely. Meanwhile, the farcical elements feel more forced than funny and the plot mechanics are as crude as the ‘hilarious’ Russian dim-wit agent who files misleading espionage reports. Credit helmer Charles Walters, in his last film, for playing things as lightly as possible. Like Grant, he knows when to push & when to pull back, making this minor outing more appealing than it has any right to be. (He even lets Grant & Hutton move in and out of available light as they walk along a real Tokyo sidewalk. The studio must have given him hell over it.) Grant was known to whistle on set when he was enjoying himself. So it’s a treat to hear him having a go at the theme from CHARADE/’63 as he puts together an alarmingly strong cup of coffee. He’d earned it.

DOUBLE-BILL: Grant played middle-man before, bringing Loretta Young & David Niven together in THE BISHOP’S WIFE/’47. And, for more on the Olympics, by all means, get the full three-hours cut of Kon Ichikawa’s TOKYO OLYMPIAD/’65. This film never got the circulation it deserved. (Possibly because the original idea was to shoot enough material so that different cuts could play in different countries.) Yet, technically, it may be the most influential film ‘never’ seen, at least from the standpoint of sports coverage. Everything involving modern sports presentation started right here, and that most certainly includes all those Bud Greenspan docus.

PROTEKTOR (2009)

Marek Najbrt chooses style over clarity in this often fascinating WWII story set largely in Prague during the Nazi occupation. Built as a long flashback from the assassination of Nazi Chief Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, which led to a huge round-up of ‘usual suspects’ and a wave of revenge executions, the story centers on a married couple’s progress going back to 1938. When first seen, she’s a rising film actress and he’s a second-tier radio announcer & executive. But as the German’s gain control, her Jewish background and his mellifluous voice reverse their career arcs; soon, she’s down & out while he’s become famous as the Voice of a Nation. The stress of an emotional separation escalates from professional to personal, until a mix-up with the assassination brings about a new kind of bond between them. Najbrt (surely this name is missing a vowel?) uses a gorgeous mix of palettes in showing the different levels of life between their art, their work and their lives. But he tends to gloss over a level of reckless behavior that’s hard to accept given the life-or-death circumstances. Were the Czechs really this blind/cavalier about the consequences of their political provocations? He also drops an interesting line of action that has Marek Daniel, playing the star announcer, hoping to work against the Nazis from within the system. No doubt, he found this impossible, but it’s never properly dramatized for us. Perhaps it’s all more apparent to a local audience. What’s apparent over here is that Marek Daniel is an absolute ‘ringer’ for Christopher Hitchens. It’s a visual touch that adds rather than subtracts from the verisimilitude of this worthwhile, if flawed political thriller.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Laurent Biner's recently translated HHhH is a well-reviewed 'faction' that charts the career of the infamous Reinhard Heydrich.

DOUBLE-BILL: For a period film that deals with the Heydrich assassination and was made soon after the real-life events, there’s Fritz Lang’s terribly uneven, but often effective HANGMEN ALSO DIE/’43 which has superbly suspenseful story construction from playwright Bertold Brecht in his sole Hollywood screenwriting credit.

THE MAN FROM LONDON (2007)

The crepuscular cinema of Hungarian Bela Tarr, with his distinctive slow-crawling camera shots & long, long takes, works unexpectedly well in this adaptation of a typically succinct, character-driven Georges Simenon novel. There’s a real kick in watching Tarr’s art-house æsthetic tethered to the genre elements of a detective story; here, the ensuing bad karma that attaches itself to a misappropriated attaché that's naturally stuffed with illegal cash. Grimly beautiful, as if Dante had reserved a Circle of Purgatory for monochrome cinematography, the film doesn’t haunt you the way other Tarr films can, the closure of finding a solution works against the resonance of staring inside something unknowable. But it's good to see Tarr trying on a different mask.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: If the dubbed English voice of the Inspector sounds familiar, that’s because Edward Fox does the vocal honors. And don’t be fooled by Tilda Swinton’s billing, she’s only in a few scenes. Probably for the best, since her meticulous specificity as an actor doesn’t quite align with Tarr’s need for a broad brush dipped in thin grey wash.
DOUBLE-BILL: Don Siegel’s scandalously underrated CHARLEY VARRICK/’73 is tops in detailing the karmic conniptions caused by a cash-loaded briefcase.

3 SAILORS AND A GIRL (1953)

This pocket-sized musical from Warners, a mash-up of ON THE TOWN/’49 and the recently released THE BAND WAGON/’53, isn’t very good . . . but it sure is peculiar. Gordon MacRea, Gene Nelson & Jack E. Leonard are three sailors on leave who bump into producer Sam Levene & his putative B’way star, ultra-petite Jane Powell. Naturally, the boys have a duffle bag of cash they’re hoping to invest and Levene’s got an unfunded show to hustle. The show flops out of town, gets fixed with the help of B’way legends Moss Hart, George Abbott & Ira Gershwin, and becomes a big hit with the boys doing specialty spots before they have to get back to their sub. Even by the standards of a let’s-put-on-a-show fable, this one’s hard to swallow; the Sammy Fain/Sammy Cahn score is forgettable; the four stars end their big group ‘numbo’ in pseudo-BlackFace; Messrs. Hart, Abbott & Gershwin are played by lookalike ‘ringers;’ poor Gene Nelson seems to disappear halfway in; and then there’s obese/fey ‘insult’ comedian Jack E. Leonard as one of the guys, singing, dancing and generally threatening to tip over. Peculiar.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The obvious choices are mentioned above: ON THE TOWN, mostly for the great shot-on-location opening, or THE BAND WAGON, wildly overmatched for the task. Why not give the old Eleanor Powell/James Stewart BORN TO DANCE/’36 a shot. It’s got just about the same silly plot (submarine sailors help out a B’way bound show) and even the same director, Roy Del Ruth, in palmier days. Plus, you get to hear Stewart introduce an honest-to-goodness Cole Porter standard, ‘Easy To Love.’

SEVEN CHANCES (1925)

For out-and-out laughs, the last two reels of SEVEN CHANCES must be the funniest sustained sequence in the Buster Keaton canon, maybe in all film. It’s no secret that the project was bought for/forced on Keaton, who found the misunderstandings of farce more tiresome than comic. Yet even in the exposition-heavy first half, he shows what graceful underplaying and clean story construction could bring to the ritual misunderstandings of the form. The gimmick is that Buster has to be married by 7 o’clock to get a 7 million dollar inheritance. When he blows the proposal to his longtime g’friend, he heads to his country club (look!, there’s Jean Arthur operating the phone switchboard) where he sequentially fails at proposing to 7 utterly indifferent girls. (And one hilariously deadpan hatcheck girl.) Formula stuff, but Keaton manages to find solid laughs in the situations, all while playing in his remarkably modern, ‘straight’ naturalistic manner. It’s still fresh & funny; and the simple narrative design gives him time for some charming throwaway visual gags. Watch for an amazing ‘invisible’ trick shot where he sits in his car while the background ‘dissolves’ to a new location.* But the film truly hits its stride (literally) when he leaves the club in disgrace to hunt up a bride (any bride!) while his pals advertise in the paper for a backup. SENSITIVITY ALERT: The next sequence has Buster proposing to various inappropriate women in a series of escalating politically incorrect gags: Blacks, Jews, Transvestism, Child Bride; it’s Equal Opportunity Offending.** Exhausted from his failures, Buster heads for the Church of Last Hope where he promptly falls asleep in the front pew, unaware that the newspaper ad has brought out every battle-hardened spinster in town. And so we come to those last two reels. The ladies are told that the newspaper proposal is just a joke. What follows is not, as often reported, a chase to marry Buster, but a chase to kill him! It’s Revenge of the Women.* The jilted brides take over every all-male activity, bricklaying to football, crane operator to train conductor. And, in a climax that is both technically & conceptually stunning, Keaton must choose between an avalanche of crushing boulders chasing him down a mountainside and the on-coming horde of jilted femininity at the bottom of the hill, waiting to tear him apart limb from limb. Farce rarely gave so much food for thought. The latest visual upgrade from KINO is a marvel, but we sure could use an aural upgrade with a full orchestral score. No?

DOUBLE-BILL/CONTEST: Two intriguing shorts are included on the DVD. Note that the 1904 Edison short, HOW THE FRENCH NOBLEMAN GOT A WIFE THROUGH THE NEW YORK HERALD PERSONAL COLUMN (catchy title!) is transferred slightly below natural speed which means that this very early film must have been shot at something over 24 fps. So much for all you’ve read about silent pics being shot under modern cranking speed. And the DVD also has a typically laugh-free THREE STOOGES short that uses the same basic plot from SEVEN CHANCES. And why not, since Keaton regular Clyde Bruckman co-wrote both films. But he also grabs a very specific gag from another Keaton pic he worked on. Naturally, the Stooges ruin the execution, but you can still spot that gag and name the other film to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of any NetFlix DVD.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY I: *In CASABLANCA, director Michael Curtiz uses the same background dissolve trick shot while Bogart & Bergman drive in the French countryside. But Curtiz did it with help from an optical printer and backscreen projection. And also take note of how similar the construction is between Buster asleep in the pew while the brides flit in and Hitchcock’s famous scene in THE BIRDS/’63 where Melanie Daniels sits on a bench smoking while the jungle-gym behind her starts to fill up with our fine feathered friends.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY II: **Note that while the inappropriate brides (Black, Jew, Transvestite, Child) are all played by appropriately cast performers, the slo-thinking ‘colored’ character is specifically, and quite obviously, played by a white guy in BlackFace. The distinction says much about what at the time was considered Racial Humor and what was considered Racist Humor.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Can't miss another opportunity to plug Walter Kerr's magnificent THE SILENT CLOWNS.

LA LOI / THE LAW / LA LEGGE / WHERE THE HOT WIND BLOWS (1959)

Jules Dassin let this Southern-Italian meller boil way past al dente. Set in a stifling little coastal town where the aging Don (Pierre Brasseur) dictates ‘the law’ to everyone, from the mayor to the priest, from the chief of police & on down, while his sharp-dressed heir apparent (Yves Montaud) works from the bottom up. But a couple of free-spirited women (Gina Lollobrigida & Melina Mercouri) threaten the established order with respective fixations on an educated outsider (Marcello Mastroianni) & Montaud’s lawyer son (Raf Mattioli). But these personal dramas play alongside a strange, sadistic truth-or-dare drinking game called ‘the law,’ a nasty piece of one-upmanship meant to keep everyone in their place. Dassin gets heaps of atmosphere & tension from this set up, but the storyline was hamstrung when his producers insisted on La Lollobrigida in a role designed for a hormonally-charged teenager. Actions that need to play out with the unthinking self-interest of youth come across with cruel calculation from a stunningly beautiful Gina at 32. And this effects the entire cast who respond with heightened playing on the verge of hysteria. You eventually adjust, ‘50s melodrama and all that, but it takes a dramatic toll. While you wait for the emotional blinders to kick in, enjoy the local detail, a great fishing sequence, and the fabulous cinematography from Otello Martelli, best known for shooting early Fellini.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Except for Marcello, the principals all appear to speak their own (dubbed) French dialogue on the only audio track of this excellent Oscilloscope DVD. But this international production must have originally been issued in many languages. Stateside it came out as WHERE THE HOT WIND BLOWS, and you can hear Jerry Jackson (?) sing the title song via SPOTIFY.

DB: Try a classic Neo-Realist look at another poor Italian fishing village in Visconti’s LA TERRA TREMA/’47.