TENGOKU TO JIGOKU / HIGH AND LOW (1962)

Akira Kurosawa makes his point right at the start of this suspenser, before we reach the main event, the kidnapping that runs the plot. In what must have seemed the largest living room then in Japan, a trio of profit-minded execs make their case against product quality. Too much bother, too expensive, too old-fashioned; why aim for durable when planned obsolescence brings lower production costs & quicker repeat business? The suits are talking about shoes, but Kurosawa sees them as representative of the new post-war Japan. And all he's got to rage against the decline in modern values is his stand-in, the great Toshiro Mifune as their adversary, the last honorable company man. Mifune is poised to risk everything on a leveraged buyout, and symbolically save Japan from short-sighted ways, when the plot kicks in on this thrilling genre pic, taken from, of all things, an Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel. The business plan will evaporate when the chauffeur’s son is mistakenly kidnapped in place of Mifune's, yet he still goes thru with the ransom. Kurosawa makes it all a stunning structural piece of work by staying in Mifune's living room for the film’s first part, pivoting in the short second act to detail the ransom drop from a fast moving train, and finally moving to the street for the sharpest police procedural imaginable for act three. The brilliance in the conception is equaled in execution, with a great cast of Kurosawa regulars and newbies. And something prescient in the way Mifune turns the screen over to Tatsuya Nakadai’s detective just as he would give way in Kurosawa’s late films. Though here, a bit of sentiment brings Mifune back for the stark, memorable coda.

DOUBLE-BILL: The young Mifune had the detective role in STRAY DOG/’49, an early Kurosawa classic.

THE PRODIGAL (1955)

This minor entry from the glut of mid-‘50s WideScreen Biblical epics is a mash-up of the Prodigal Son parable & Elijah. Released under the insulting rubric ‘Cult Camp Classics,’ it’s none of the above, but merely Dull, Dull, Dull. Richard Thorpe, a vet M-G-M routiner, had recently surprised everyone with his unexpectedly lively megging of IVANHOE/’52, shot on location in the U.K. But back on his home turf, working on big, airless studio soundstages, he barely phones it in. At least Lana Turner looks yummy, a true High Priestess . . . of Burlesque. One look at those curves and the carefree Prodigal, Edmund Purdom, is ready to go the distance for her, unaware that Louis Calhern, Francis L Sullivan & Neville Brand (!) are all plotting to plunder his fortune, enslave him & make him renounce Jehovah. Purdom, who took over when Marlon Brando walked on THE EGYPTIAN/’54 and then replaced a fat Mario Lanza as THE STUDENT PRINCE/’54, isn’t bad at all as the heroic, if deluded Hebrew, if only he didn’t look so much like James Franco. (Check him out once he gets a shave.) Doomed to always be second choice. James Mitchell has fun as a mute who apparently learned to communicate from Harpo Marx and there’s actually a good perf from Joseph Wiseman as a conniving fair-weather ally. Plus, a great stuffed vulture for Purdom to fight! There’s even a big, bombastic Bronislau Kaper score! Sounds like goofy fun, but except for the busy last two reels, it’s kind of a drag.

DOUBLE-BILL: Instead of another bible story, why not stick with the M-G-M Middle-East tour of 1955 which continues from this film’s Culver City Damascus to Culver City Bagdad in KISMET.

NOTHING SACRED (1937)

William A. Wellman was the wrong man to helm a Ben Hecht newspaper comedy, but he bullied his way thru two: ROXIE HART/’42 (which grew into the musical CHICAGO/’02) and this one about the small-town gal dying of radium-poisoning who briefly becomes the Toast of NYC. Too bad she’s perfectly healthy. It’s certainly breathtakingly cynical, Hecht was an equal opportunity skewerer, but alas not breathtakingly funny. Everyone’s in there trying . . . too hard: reporter Fredric March, editor Walter Connolly, doctor Charles Winninger & Carole Lombard as the suffering patient. The first half of the film works best, especially the famous scenes in small town New England (where a little kid dashes out from behind a fence to bite March on the leg!) or during the show-biz tributes to Lombard’s fortitude (horseflesh & strippers @ a nightclub and a bell-tolling moment of silence @ the pro-wrestling match). But Wellman’s films rarely live up to their potential*, plus you can feel the hand of producer David O Selznick weighing things down with showmanship & TechniColor. And a botched ending that feels like a failed rewrite because it is a failed rewrite. And not by Hecht. At least, it’s now possible to see a decent copy since KINO has trumped the faded old Public Domain ‘dupes’ with an edition sourced from the Selznick Estate copy.

DOUBLE-BILL: The number of first-rate Screwball Comedies can be toted up on the digits (fingers & toes) of a single human being. Even Lombard, the Queen of the Genre, only got a few great ones. MY MAN GODFREY/’36 shows her at her enchanting best.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Irene Mayer Selznick (daughter of Louis B., wife of David O. & by general consensus the smartest gal in town) thought Wellman the biggest phony in the biz. And while he does have some convincing early credits, it’s hard to work up much of an argument with her, though some might point to THE OX-BOW INCIDENT/’43 . . . others might not.

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER (2010)

Like a jogger who keeps running in place when stopped by a red light, Woody Allen’s lesser pics only exist to keep the creative motor in tune. No fallow season for the Woodman! This extra dark comedy is set in Britain, though it barely partakes of the place, and it’s the usual roundelay of sex & recoupling. An old marriage (Anthony Hopkins/Gemma Jones) and their daughter’s newer marriage (Josh Brolin/Naomi Watts) are each breaking up. New partners appear for all (Antonio Banderas/Freida Pinto/Lucy Punch/Roger Ashton-Griffiths), but just bring new problems to replace the old. Life goes on . . . miserably. Only the slightly delusional get some sort of shot at happiness. It’s Woody’s most Hobbesian comedy (oh, that’s the English part), and even a jaunty narrator pointing out life’s absurdities can‘t lighten the mood. It’s a legit POV, but Woody makes his characters too foolish to buy into (the old goat/hooker bride is a particular embarrassment) and compounds the problem by saving his biggest narrative blunder for a final ‘got’cha’ moment.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Surely, the Donizetti opera Woody uses @ Covent Garden shouldn't be LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR, but DON PASQUALE with a plot that mirrors the Anthony Hopkins story line 'to a tee.'

LOS CHRONOCRIMENES / TIMECRIMES (2007)

In this well-received debut pic, Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo helms, scripts & even takes a major supporting role in a twisty time-travel fable. (He also earned a possible Stateside remake with some snazzy talent already attached.) The story follows an ordinary Joe who slowly comes to realize that the phantom figure he’s been following (or is it following him?) just might be . . . himself, a doppelgänger living on a slightly delayed parallel time line. The plot unwinds forward & back in a manner that’s pleasing & puzzling, cresting with a great moment-of-recognition cue that’s visually keyed to the (re)appearance of a blood-stained bandage. But after achieving this midpoint peak, the cat’s-cradle metaphysics begin to collapse. And by the finale, Vigalondo gives in with a tacit admission of defeat that ignores too many of the story’s implications.

DOUBLE-BILL: While Christopher Nolan’s MEMENTO/’00 doesn’t involve time travel, he does find better answers to some similarly daunting time-weave continuity hurdles.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: To see how much difference a little bit of time travel can make in a story, try the brilliantly funny, deliriously silly goof on everything STAR TREK, GALAXY QUEST/’99. Why scripter David Howard hasn’t found more work in Hollywood is something of a sad mystery.

THE GREEN HORNET (2011)

A smarty-pants dud that juggles the usual Super Hero tropes (mostly from BATMAN and IRON MAN) to little effect, comic or otherwise. Arrogant & inept in equal measure, it seems to have disenfranchised itself on entry. But if you do see a GREEN HORNET II on the horizon, scat!

THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK (1958)

This Saturday Matinee B-pic from Paramount is a ‘thinking boy’s’ monster movie. It’s loaded with nice provocative ideas, but, oh!, that execution. A Nobel Scientist with grand plans on feeding the world dies just as he gets back from Sweden, but secretly his detached brain is revived inside the metal body of a giant robot by his slightly crazed father & his mechanically gifted older brother. But there’s trouble brewing (really?) since Dad always liked the dead son best and didn’t suspect his other son was now in love with the grieving ‘widow.’ She’s being kept in the dark about the monstrous resurrection, but can’t help but notice when her father-in-law goes rabid after the local clergyman (who also has the hots for the ‘widow’) blathers on about mortality & morality during the eulogy. Meanwhile, the scientist’s young son is guilt-ridden because Dad was killed chasing after his toy plane. So, when this kid bumps into the monster at his dad’s grave, he finds himself a large, metallic father figure. Now things really get strange! Suddenly, inexplicably, Mr Monster can see the future; he can see your thoughts; he’s even waterproof! And when he sees his older brother putting the make on his wife, he decides he was a chump to try and help humanity. Feed the World? Better to Destroy the World! Helped by its nonexistent budget, the film boasts a neat clean look (helmer Eugene Lourie’s day job was art director) and someone in the sound department worked up some creepy Geiger-counter noises for the robot-monster and really loud crashes for various breakable objects. Even the main titles and a solo piano background score show some imagination. If only the dialogue weren’t so painfully idiotic or the acting so thuddingly dismal. Otto Kruger is pleasingly mad as the scientist's father, but the wife (Mala Powers) really deserves some sort of booby prize. Just the same, low-budget sci-fi mavens will want to suffer thru it.

DOUBLE-BILL: Speaking of mechanical men . . . Robbie the Robot also puts a scientist’s cute kid in harm's way in THE INVISIBLE BOY/’57.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: While its all too easy to read pedophiliac tendencies into the most innocuous of actions, especially in films from the ‘50s, the level of discomfort goes pretty high here. Bad enough that the uncle gives gifts to the boy by having the kid reach into his pockets, but then Dad, in his monster form, first warns the child to never, never, never touch that little handle that’s hidden under his cape. And then, at the climax, when he needs the tyke to help him pull off his noble self-sacrifice, he orders the boy to reach in, find the ‘handle’ and push, push, push hard, Billy, push hard! Yikes!

BEZHIN LUG/BEZHIN MEADOW (1937)

It’s dangerous to make extravagant claims for a lost film (the damn thing might turn up!), but the scraps that remain from Sergei Eisenstein’s never-released BEZHIN MEADOW really do look like the residue of a masterpiece, a lyrical tragedy such as he never attempted before or after. After failed sojourns in Hollywood & Mexico, Eisenstein returned to the USSR having not completed a film since OLD AND NEW/’29 (aka THE GENERAL LINE). Oddly, he opts for another story on the struggle between the tradition-bound land-owning ‘Kulaks’ and the principled collective farmers. But in his first Talkie, the focus would narrow down to a father & son conflict, a drunken, murderous, God-fearing beast vs. his brave ten yr-old son, with the bright Soviet future on the line. Why this story earned the dreaded tag of ‘formalism’ is something of a mystery. The big set piece, a community desecration of the town church, must have pleased the authorities; and there’s little left to indicate a difficult story construction or arty use of Eisenstein’s preferred ‘montage of attraction’ theories. Perhaps the portrayal of the Kulaks left them looking too similar to the proletariat. Where were the upper-class airs & lording it over the masses? Perhaps. But there’s only so much you can dig out of the half-hour graphic story material that still exists. It was put together in the ‘60s from editing ‘trims’ Eisenstein kept as a record of the shoot. Inter-titles were created from the complete script & a background score was culled from Prokofiev cues. The bare bones that remain are both compositionally beautiful and unexpectedly moving. But are we reacting to the film . . . or to our own ideas, filling in on what has been lost? Three years later, the film’s producer was executed after the debacle while Eisenstein worked himself out of the doghouse, even won the Order of Lenin Prize, with the straightforward patriotism of ALEXANDER NEVSKY/’38. And then that film got buried for a few years in the wake of a Non-Aggression Pact fling with Hitler. Thus art under Stalin.

SCREWY THOUGH OF THE DAY: It’s hardly a state secret that Stalin’s policy of collective farming, particularly as it was applied in the Ukraine, was responsible for wide spread famine that killed millions. So, how are we supposed to respond to a film that justifies & celebrates what amounted to a state-supported death march? Maybe someone could start a blog to deal with this issue.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY (1979)

The recent big screen adaptation of John le Carré’s novel (2011) turned out so well, you may wonder if the old BBC mini-series deserves a look, if it’s as good as you remember, if it merits nearly six hours of your time. Yes³! There’s plenty of material to justify the length, and the extra space helps fix the main weakness of the big screen version, not having the time to properly consider each of the four suspects. Secretly brought out of forced retirement to find the Russian ‘mole’ at the top of ‘the Circus,’ Alec Guinness's George Smiley gives a master class in the sheer force of listening. In this version, we feel as if we are playing this deadly game inside Guinness’s head, behind those crucifying eyeglasses instead of just watching it unfold. So, while the gasp-worthy moments in the new film version come off as beautifully choreographed action sequences; here, they come on a hush as Guinness puzzles things out for himself.  And the effect is thrilling.  Also, the producers got lucky, going into production just as the BBC switched from shooting exteriors on film & interiors on video tape (a penny wise/pound foolish policy if ever there was one) to shooting everything on film. And they also got smart, hiring Tony Pierce-Roberts, years before he revivified the Merchant/Ivory films with A ROOM WITH A VIEW/’85, to shoot this in the underrated Super 16mm format. The original British broadcast ran 7 episodes. Stateside, PBS nipped it down to six, removing nearly 30 minutes. A new Acorn DVD edition keeps the six part format, but puts all the missing footage back in. Look for a running time of about 320 minutes. John Irvin’s helming; Arthur Hopcraft’s script; and a plus-perfect cast make this just about as good as these things get.

DOUBLE-BILL: Have a comparison party, check out the film version of TTSS.  In fact, you could watch it first and then watch this after a spell.  Watching it after this might just seem redundant.