NEVER LET ME GO (2010)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel must have been a bit more solid than this doom-laden mush. As it stands, Alex Garland’s fuzzy script & Mark Romanek’s swoony megging have made it the perfect pic for anyone who can’t bear to take Gorecki’s Symphony #3: ‘Sorrowful Songs’ off their playlist. The tale’s jolly conceit, which might do service for Monty Python, holds that decades ago humans were cultivated for their parts . . . like Purdue chickens. Once mature, they’re prepped for organ donation, usually doing three ‘procedures’ before giving up the ghost. (And did the company pack the liver, heart, neck & gizzard in a neat plastic bag for the squeamish? Heck, do we humanoids have a gizzard?) Zounds!, this all sounds like a major global concern, but why worry over ethics when a soulful romantic entanglement quivers into fitful view. Yes, a bitch of a triangle for two woman (fragile/neurotic Keira Knightley; sweet/docile Cary Mulligan) and the skinny male classmate they mist over (skinny/skinny Andrew Garfield*). The opening scenes with the trio as kids at Hogwarts, er . . . Hailsham Academy are good creepy fun (it’s THE STEPFORD KIDS meets COMA), but once the grown ups take over the roles (none well-matched with their youthful selves, not even their hair), the whole set up starts to feel like . . . a set-up. Anyway, the whole gang are so lacking in motivation, so hopelessly lethargic, it’s hard to believe their organs could be of much help to anyone.

DOUBLE-BILL: Pauline Kael blissfully took down an earlier totalitarian Pop fantasy when François Truffaut’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 541/’66 came out, imagining the poor sucker who had to live their life as the living memory of VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. See her review on the NY’er archive.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Check out those skinny legs on Mr. Garfield! No wonder he got cast as Spidey in the Spider-Man reboot.

STRAIT-JACKET (1964)

Bette Davis & Joan Crawford had such an unlikely success with Robert Aldrich’s WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE/’62, that a re-teaming looked inevitable. But Crawford’s health recused her from HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE/’64. (Olivia de Havilland stepped in, very nicely, too.) Books have been written on ‘what really happened’ behind the scenes, but the reasons for Joan’s vanishing act grow a lot clearer once this trashy piece of shock schlock is taken into account: Crawford wanted Davis’s role. And damned if she doesn’t get just that in this fast-track release from the very same year. Now, Joan’s the reclusive axe-wielding nutcase in this laughable horror vehicle . . . or is she? And Crawford’s not the only one on this project out to get their due. There’s Robert Bloch, author of the book Hitchcock turned into PSYCHO/’60. He tosses in mother fixation, phantom voices, a murdered investigator, cheap wigs falling off at the climax, even a spic-n-span bathroom with a shower curtain waiting to be flung open. You can easily parody these William Castle productions and the campy intensity of Joan Crawford’s determination to remain a movie star, but what’s the point? (Be sure to check out Columbia's Lady-with-the-Torch logo at the end of this film. She’s lost her head!)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Producer/director William Castle was more marketer than filmmaker. Bloodied cardboard axes were the freebies of choice. But why not a real Carny Campaign?

• SEE Joan Crawford in her black ‘fright-wig’ after a ‘youth’ make-over!
• HEAR Joan confess to how she spends her days. ‘Knitting!’
• WATCH Crawford molest a spinning 78 rpm shellac disc by striking a match on its innocent surface!
• FEEL the terror as Joan puts the moves on debuting John Anthony Hayes, stopping his career before it ever got going!

THE DRUM / DRUMS (1938)

The Brothers Korda (producer Alexander, helmer Zoltan & designer Vincent) had a passion for the British Colonies that only comes to Hungarian emigrants. After ELEPHANT BOY/’37, but before THE FOUR FEATHERS/’39, they made this A. E. W. Mason adventure about a brave young Indian Prince (Sabu) whose peace-loving father is murdered by his treacherous uncle (Canadian Raymond Massey in dark ethnic disguise). After warning his British drummer boy pal (hey!, it’s red-headed Desmond Tester, the kid with the bomb on the bus in Hitchcock’s SABOTAGE/'36), Sabu sneaks ahead of the British relief column and manages to beat his ‘tattoo’ on the ceremonial drum to warn his British friends (led by wonderful Roger Livesey) of his uncle’s trap. Raj claptrap, you say? Well, take these things with a grain or two of salt and they can be quite tasty. Zoltan Korda never had the sheer bravura technique of fellow Hungarian helmer Michael Curtiz, nor the ability to call on Errol Flynn & the resources of the Brothers Warner, and this story hasn’t the majestic sweep of FEATHERS (nor the sweeping score by yet another Hungarian, the great Miklos Rosza), but it’s rousing stuff all the same.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Criterion includes this in their 3-pic SABU! package along with ELEPHANT BOY and JUNGLE BOOK/’42. Visually, the restoration is a rare miss for the company with an image that preserves the airy, almost translucent quality of a real nitrate TechniColor print, but suffers from variable color density & a lack of sharpness. Better elements were available not so long ago, perhaps the source is suspect. (From a re-release print?)

CANDLESHOE (1977)

This typically bland/technically shoddy bit of family-fare from the post-Walt doldrums @ Disney Studios should (at least) work. An updated variation on LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY, it puts a teenage Jody Foster in as the streetwise kid & unlikely heir, and adds a couple of okay twists. #1: Foster’s working a con game & really on the hunt for buried treasure inside the old mansion; and #2: it turns out that her new ‘grandparent’ is flat broke. It sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, yet a straight 1980 tv adaptation of FAUNTLEROY, with Ricky Schroder & Alec Guinness, was hugely successful.* Like so much Disney product under the reign of Walt’s son-in-law, Ron Miller (and house megger Norman Tokar), this feels both unnecessary & retrograde. You know something’s seriously off right from the prologue when Foster refers to Rudolph Valentino in a wisecrack. Valentino? As lady of the manor & her butler, Helen Hayes & David Niven twinkle alarmingly once we hit the old sod, while Foster gets to tangle with a quartet of foster kids who happily do all the upkeep on the mansion. (Like those mice in CINDERELLA/’50, but with lower voices.) To his credit, Niven manages to keep his dignity even when the script has him masquerading as the rest of the household staff. Foster, on the other hand, makes (and even looks) like Mickey Rooney in some dim ‘30s vehicle with completely mechanical sit-com reactions for every occasion. To her credit, she stayed off the screen for four years after this, returning all grown up.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *While the Schroder/Guinness FAUNTLEROY hasn’t shown up on DVD, the old Selznick production from 1936, with Freddie Bartholomew & Mickey Rooney, is more than okay. And Mary Pickford’s 1921 silent version is even better.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Of all the towering theater actresses from her generation, Helen Hayes, the ‘Queen of the American Stage,’ left by far the largest sampling of her work on screen. Yet nothing helps us see what all the fuss was about.

BRIGHTON ROCK (2010)

The original BRIGHTON ROCK/’47, adapted from his own novel by Graham Greene (with Terrence Rattigan), rarely seems to show up. Now, here’s a new version, with the story modishly updated to the early ‘60s. It’s the directing debut of Rowan Joffe, son of turgid helmer Roland Joffé, and while it’s stylishly accomplished on the surface, the story loses rather than gains resonance from the time shift. Sam Riley is too smooth & a decade too mature as ‘Pinkie,’ the young, amoral punk trying to poach territory from a rival gang for his protection racket. When the older, better funded group takes action against him, someone winds up dead and Pinkie needs to babysit a possible witness to the crime. That’s Rose, played by Andrea Riseborough, also a good decade on the wrong side of her role. So when she’s falls for Pinkie, reading his threatening menace as romantic yearnings, she seems more daft than innocent. And Sam Riley, at thirty, isn’t able to mask his own confusion about his conflicted feelings as awkward adolescent behavior. Joffe tries to pull in the changing social world of youth gangs ( Mods & Rockers) as a comparison to the old guard thugs, but the two worlds don’t meaningfully interact, it's just scenery. Plenty of good actors are milling about (Helen Mirren, John Hurt, Andy Serkis), but the connective tissue is missing. And the jokey bit of Catholic mysticism right at the end might even have made Graham Greene blush.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Try the original BRIGHTON ROCK/’47 from the Boulting Bros (apparently now out in all regions) and let us know what you think.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/brighton-rock-1948.html

IT'S A WONDERFUL WORLD (1939)

A couple of legendary scripters, Ben Hecht & Herman J. Mankiewicz, had the neat idea of putting the usual suspects & farcical doings of a ‘Screwball’ comedy inside a Hitchcockian innocent-man-on-the-run story, specifically THE 39 STEPS/’35. Right down to having the bickering leads spend an uncomfortable night handcuffed together.* But while their intentions are right on the money, the execution, as so often with second-tier screwballs, isn’t all it might be. Still, when they aren’t pushing too hard, James Stewart (as a private dick on the lam to prove his client’s innocence) & Claudette Colbert (a poetess hoping for adventure & a bit of notoriety to boost sales) are plenty charming. Watch them interact on a boat where Claudette is briefly turned into a living cameo portrait when seen thru a port hole or earlier when Jimmy grabs Claudette like a bag of potatoes off a rickety fence. In general, the silly detective story works better than the gags, and the funniest scene is all cops & dicks as comic flatfoots Nat Pendleton, Edgar Kennedy & Guy Kibbee get dressed down by a Captain. This guy has the chutzpah to pull a slow burn on Edgar Kennedy, the greatest slow-burn artist in film history! Now, that’s screwy.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The reason this more than respectable Screwball is rarely revived becomes all too apparent late in the film when Stewart hides out with a summer stock company and puts on Blackface (and a ‘darkie’ accent) as a disguise. Oy veh!

DOUBLE-BILL: *A true Hitchcock innocent-man-on-the-run wouldn’t be a detective already on the case, but someone who gets accidently pulled in. Yes? No? Maybe? Well, think of NOTORIOUS/’46, the great collaboration from Hitch & Hecht. There, neither Cary Grant nor Ingrid Bergman could be described as an uninvolved accidental bystander. Or, go in the other direction and check out Hitch’s one & only Screwball, and a pretty good one, MR. & MRS. SMITH/’41. A film made at the specific request of Carole Lombard, the Queen of Screwball, whose rep was made by . . . Ben Hecht in Howard Hawks’ TWENTIETH CENTURY/’34.

BIUTIFUL (2010)

After three projects joined at the hip, scripter Guiilermo Arriago & helmer Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu went their separate (slightly embittered) ways. The films had been both admired & detracted for their elaborately interlaced storylines that casually (or should that read causally?) ricocheted off each other. And while it’s quite a trick to keep so many storylines going at once, it’s even harder to make do with one. Now, working on his own, Iñárritu tries just that, aiming for a bit more depth as he follows the rapid decline of Javier Bardem’s all-around merchandise hustler. But Iñárritu overcompensates, stuffing his sole leading character with the baggage of twenty, as if incident equalled drama, narrative simple arithmetic. He was smart to get Javier Bardem, few actors other than Cate Blanchette ‘take’ light so dramatically. But what a load the guy hauls! Separated from a bi-polar wife; saddled with two troubled pre-teens; keeping rein on a crew of irresponsible Senegalese illegal immigrant hustlers; plus a warehouse of Chinese illegals; even a score of dead immigrants! And there's protection pay-outs to impotent cops; a brother who runs a sex club & fools around with your crazy ex; a father Bardem never met, but gets to rebury . . . oh, and a touch of terminal cancer leaving you a month or so to live. Iñárritu handles much of this stylishly, though the fussy color palette grows tiresome, especially at a self-indulgent two & a half hours. By then, the seams are showing and sympathy is lagging. Still, it’s nice to know that when you get to heaven your hair looks great, you get to smoke and there’s Ravel on the soundtrack.

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932)

This last of the Pre-Code Hollywood Horror classics to appear on DVD in a properly restored edition (via Criterion) is well worth the wait. A free adaptation of H. G. Wells, and much censored over the years, it’s nearly as creepy & unsettling as it must have seemed 80 years ago. In form & setting, it’s cousin to THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME/’32 (isolated island jungle, mad master-race ruler, shipwreck opening, Richard Arlen in for Joel McCrea), while its theme of tampering with human life is a fun-house mirror of FRANKENSTEIN/’31. Charles Laughton, showing plenty of acting discipline as Dr. Moreau, has seen his experiments in surgical eugenics go horribly wrong, populating his island with near-human monstrosities. These unfortunates still have the power to cause some real shivers, especially when Moreau goes to work on them in his ‘House of Pain’ operating room. The whole cast seems caught up in the dreadful atmosphere with Arlen & Bela Lugosi doing some of their best work while supporting stalwart Arthur Hohl, as Moreau’s second-in-command, shows what he could do given a multi-dimensional character. Helmer Erle Kenton spent most of his career on low-budget fare, including some Frankenstein retreads in the ‘40s, but here, with a decent budget & the great cinematographer Karl Struss, he shows a remarkably fluid technique for the day.* Even with a restored running time, the film shortchanges us on exposition & motivation, yet it’s managed not to acquire the antique charm of its horror brethren, still giving off a clammy sense of doom that’s hard to shake off even in our ironic, post-modern times.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *With good production values and the prestigious presence of Charles Laughton, this was a plum assignment for director Erle Kenton. But its general look, especially the atmospheric opening reels, may owe just as much to his deference to Paramount’s great cinematographer Karl Struss. Those fog bound waters with ships passing each other, and the introductory scenes on the island look like the Hollywood horror pic F. W. Murnau might have made. After all, Murnau’s NOSFERATU/’22 may be the first great horror pic, and Struss co-shot SUNRISE/’27 for him @ Fox with Charles Rosher. NOSFERATU remains a problematic title, but is much improved after a major 2007 restoration. Try the latest 2-disc edition from KINO.

THE CHAIRMAN (1969)

Ludicrous, but not much fun, this political thriller sends Gregory Peck to the People’s Republic of China for a stirring game of Ping-Pong with Chairman Mao (two years before Nixon’s Ping-Pong diplomacy) and a secret formula that could trigger an Agricultural Revolution. That is, if his military pals in the West don’t set off the remote bomb they’ve implanted in the back of his head! Peck had two of iconic hits with helmer J. Lee Thompson (GUNS OF NAVARONE/’61 & CAPE FEAR/’62), but stumbled badly with him on MACKENNA’S GOLD/’69.* That was a big, noisy flop, this one disappeared quietly. (Note should be made of Thompson’s odd au courant cutting style. Trying to be ‘with it,’ he only manages to be distracting.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Peck finally got his late career hit when he took a gamble with a classy horror pic. The risk paid off when THE OMEN/’76 came out, changing the course for many an aging Hollywood leading man just as Bette Davis had stirred the pot for aging Hollywood divas with WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE/’62.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Few guilty pleasures are guiltier than MACKENNA’S GOLD. With its all-star cast, immense scale & improbable treasure chest storyline, this Western is stupefying stuff . . . and (though much patience is required) more fun than many a sane pic.