CHUNG HING SAM LAM / CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994)

Maybe the “pop’ style and visual romanticism of Kar Wai Wong’s breakthrough pic (his third as director) has been too influential. Whatever the reason, the film now seems a pretty, but empty vessel in search of a soft drink. In the first of two separate-but-unequal billet-doux, Brigitte Lin’s temptress-in-a-bad-blonde-wig leads Takeshi Kaneshiro’s pineapple-addled cop on a mystery tour that ends in a shooting. Then, in the more substantial second story, another cop (Tony Leung) licks his wounds after being dumped by his girl, slowly realizing he’s become an object of desire for Faye Wong’s lunch counter attendant. There’s an off-the-charts ‘cute-quotient’ to the cast, especially Faye Wong with her Jean Seberg routine, but it’s the nearly abstract use of color, space, tricked up editing & scripted personality quirks from Kar Wai Wong that holds this together. For many, it’s enough to offset a twee tone that leaves you hungry for another film after an hour.

DOUBLE-BILL: Tony Leung & Takeshi Kaneshiro reunited as strategizing warrior and methodical storm prognosticator in John Woo’s RED CLIFF/’08;’09 which didn’t get the Stateside traction it deserved, thanks to a brutally shortened theatrical-release cut. But, at full length, the 2-Part edition is tremendous fun. Now, Kar Wai Wong’s latest, THE GRANDMASTER/’13, starring Leung, has suffered a similar amputation in a botched Stateside release. Hopefully, the original cut will show on some near-future video release.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Thanks to a few misspellings in a previous MAKSQUIBS Write-Up that kept this from popping up during a SEARCH, this is an unintentional rewrite. Four years on, the film’s charms have largely curdled. But take your critical pick.

LAKPOSHTHAPARVAZ MIKONAND / TURTLES CAN FLY (2003)

This moving wartime tale from Bahman Ghobadi tracks the disrupted lives of an army of young kids, many orphaned, many walking-wounded, who scavenge up a life near the Iraq/Turkey border by gleaning the fields for land-mines. They’re lead by a tough 13-yr-old wiseguy nicknamed Satellite (for his talent at bringing in tv signals) who sells & barters the salvaged weapons when he’s not maintaining territorial rights. One rival, an armless boy with his own group, earns easy protection because Satellite falls for his lovely young sister and also because he has a mysterious ability to predict the future. Ghobadi gets some miraculous work out of his amateur cast (some of the sidekicks are unforgettable), but the film runs out of narrative steam about halfway in. Perhaps we can’t help but bring too much hindsight to a film made before post-war tragedy overwhelmed Iraq, or maybe the problem stems from a dropped secondary storyline involving a border-hopping doctor trying to find that forecasting boy. As it stands, Ghobadi has little choice but to tease out the next tragic moment and hope that the allegorical aspects of children fighting territorial wars comes thru.

BANK HOLIDAY (aka THREE ON A WEEKEND) (1938)

Carol Reed started to get critical attention after making this well-received dramedy about a handful of mid-to-lower class couples & families grasping at fun in one of those ghastly British shore towns. But balanced against the travails of too many people working too hard at having a good time, is Margaret Lockwood as a maternity nurse in a story more serious & more adult than the rest. She’s wavering between a long-planned, unchaperoned trip with unofficial fiancé Hugh Williams, and her sudden, unexpected emotional attachment to the nice young man back at the hospital who’s just lost his wife in childbirth. As director, Reed orchestrates these stories with ease and witty visual flair, moving back & forth with a fluid touch between beachfront adventures and the young widower’s loneliness & growing despair. Managing to keep the usual condescension toward ‘little people’ at their leisure out of the mix and even wangling in a bit of unexpected color-blind casting. Look sharp to see a young & handsome Michael Rennie as a Guardsman and a typically amusing piece of character comedy work from the great Wilfird Lawson, Alfred P. Doolittle in PYGMALION that year. Nowadays, Reed tends to be taken for granted, his most famous pic, THE THIRD MAN/’49, pegged as a collaborative effort with credit flowing toward Graham Greene, Orson Welles & Anton Karas’s zither. Don’t believe it, the guy was a natural.

SPOILER: The script missteps in the last act. Not only by dropping the infant boy from the storyline, but by messing up Lockwood’s ride-to-the-rescue climax. Lodge would never have gone for poisoned gas, the tone’s all wrong for the film. What should have happened is for Lockwood to dash in, with cops breaking down the door, only to find Lodge safe, sound . . . and surprised. Cut to the train arriving back at the resort just as Lodge, Lockwood & baby step off for a wknd. No wonder the Brits couldn’t break into other markets.

MIMI METALLURGICO FERITO NELL'ONORE / THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI (1972)

Lina Wertmüller’s brief, shining moment in the cultural discussion began with this socio-sexual comedy, only to expire a mere three films (and three years) later. The films were all big, noisy, contrarian tracts with pleasures that diminish pic by pic, irregardless of the order seen. And, as quickly as it had appeared, her voice largely vanished from the American theatrical film scene. Which makes MIMI as good a place as any to start. Giancarlo Giannini stars as a married Sicilian metalworker who returns home with a mistress & their kid after being exiled up north for voting Communist. But when he’s cuckolded by his all but forgotten wife, he plots a revenge against the little bastard’s father, seducing & impregnating his wife. Back on the work front, hardball tactics from organized crime types and political blandishments from right-wingers lead Giannini away from his few remaining proletariat convictions . . . life’s complications go on. Wertmüller stirs the pot with outrageous juxtapositions of scale & image, pushing laughs and serious points at us like a carnival barker. She’s relentless. The influences of Fellini and Pietro Germi are obvious*, but her coarse tone wears you down. (More and more as you see her other pics.) As the free-spirited mistress from the north, Mariangela Melato talks a mile a minute, gets her laughs, and, for a startling moment right at the end, looks exactly like Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Everyone else overplays like mad, cancelling each other out even as Giannini’s buffo act (Marcello Mastroianni-meets-Charlie Chaplin) supplies a rooting interest.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DY: Giannini’s character is nicknamed ‘Mimi,’ like the heroine in Puccini’s LA BOHEME. He even quotes the opening line of her intro aria, ‘Mi chiamano Mimi.’ Yet, much of the film’s ill-fitting score is taken from Verdi’s LA TRAVIATA, the Callas Cetra recording of ‘53.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Germi’s DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE/’61 w/ Mastroianni. Like the difference between fresh mozzarella & the supermarket stuff.

BON VOYAGE (2003)

Best known for prestige items like his dutiful CYRANO DE BERGERAC/’90, Jean-Paul Rappeneau was a throwback to the old school Cinema-of-Quality directors so loathed by the coming Nouvelle Vague generation @ Cahiers du Cinéma. This film, apparently his last, is a big WWII adventure (with comic trimmings) that follows its loosely connected cast (a spy, an actress, her lover(s), a scientist (w/ a stash of heavy water), politicos & a prison escapee) as they flee to the south when Paris falls. Handsome to look at, with a ricocheting plot that’s all cross & double-cross chases, it’s fun in an impersonal corporate manner, but Rappeneau doesn’t know when to let a scene bloom or when to press, and his action staging might have come out of an instruction manual with a couple of missing pages. It’s like one of those plush late ‘50s or ‘60s Blake Edwards’ war comedies . . . but helmed by John Sturges. The film crashes whenever leading lady Isabelle Adjani shows up as a vain movie star whose complete self-involvement gets everyone in trouble. She keeps an ironic distance, hiding behind the joke instead of embracing it. She might have done better to follow the lead of co-star Gérard Depardieu who plays it straight, locating his laughs behind a real threat. (He also temporarily dropped 50 lbs. which helps.) Yvan Attal, as the escaped felon, and Peter Coyote’s multilingual mystery man do equally well, but the rest of the cast is as blandly efficient as the film itself. Actually, the film is worse than efficient . . . it's tasteful.

DOUBLE-BILL: Bertrand Tavernier’s SAFE CONDUCT/’02 takes its suspenseful WWII comic adventures seriously. A true behind-the-scenes tale set in the film industry of Occupied France, its first half suffers from a bad case of roving camera syndrome, but pulls itself together thrillingly in part two.

PONY EXPRESS (1953)

Unless you were called SHANE, Paramount wasn’t a great place to be a Western in ‘53. A point confirmed by Charlton Heston with ARROWHEAD and PONY EXPRESS (a reworking of James Cruze’s 1925 follow-up to THE COVERED WAGON/’23). Both scripted by Charles Marquis Warren, a prolific Western routiner, they sport unfashionable attitudes toward Native Americans, poorly fashioned plots and precious few old-fashioned movie-making virtues. Heston & Forrest Tucker plod along as Buffalo Bill Cody & Wild Bill Hickok, advance men for the upcoming Pony Express. And they also have to fight off a confederate of California secessionists plotting against their success, a group that includes Rhonda Fleming . . . until she falls for Chuck. Paramount coughed up a decent budget for this, but under Jerry Hopper’s journeyman megging, it unwinds like a programmer. Playing a tomboy with a bad case of unrequited love for Heston, Jan Sterling does well with the character clichés. She certainly has fun bathing in a twin tub next to Fleming, letting us enjoy some serious bosomy pulchritude.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Heston made quite a few Westerns. He’d have popped for the modern deep-dish allegory of WILL PENNY/’68; Film Mavens keep hoping Peckinpah’s MAJOR DUNDEE/’66 will live up to their dreams of it; Heston agnostics opt for his supporting perf in William Wyler’s undervalued THE BIG COUNTRY/’58. Truth is, Chuck’s ‘best’ Western isn’t a Western at all. It’s Anthony Mann’s EL CID/’61.

I CONFESS (1953)

Falling between two of Alfred Hitchcock’s best known titles from his uneven Warner Bros. days (STRANGERS ON A TRAIN/’51; DIAL M FOR MURDER/’54), this noirish thriller (with Neo-Realist leanings) is often classified as ‘minor’ Hitchcock.* A misplaced tag, perhaps stemming from a basic idea that’s too near Hitchcockian perfection to trust: After taking the confession of a murderer, a Priest finds himself Prime Suspect in the killing . . . yet can’t speak up without breaking Holy Vows. Yikes, talk about Catholic Guilt! That side of the story plays out beautifully, with glowering skies over cobblestoned Quebec and Montgomery Clift capturing the priest’s mental shifts with powerful restraint. (Hitch may have found method acting techniques a pain, and Monty may have been mystified by his Po-faced master, but the results are phenomenal, an absurdly underrated perf from a year that saw Clift later working under Vittorio De Sica & Fred Zinnemann.) With fine supporting perfs from O. E. Hasse & Dolly Haas as the guilt-ridden foreign-born couple, but coming up short in its secondary plotline, a big Red Herring involving a past  love affair between the pre-ordained Clift and Anne Baxter’s society wife. Apparently, stronger illicit activities (an on-going affair, a secret child) were ix-nayed by the very pro-Catholic Breen Commission censors, reducing the lengthy flashback scenes into dreamy filler with not enough at stake. Even Dmitri Tiomkin’s score only comes to life when he quotes the famous medieval Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) theme. File this under ‘good,’ rather than ‘great’ Hitchcock, but not ‘minor.’

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Have your own Priestly Cassock Fashion Showdown between wasp-waisted Montgomery Clift and the slightly more swaggering Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Pierre Melville’s LÉON MORIN, PRÊTRE/’61. Such dashin' fashion.

DOUBLE-BILL: Unconventionally downbeat & documentarian, Hitch’s THE WRONG MAN/’56 took up similar concerns and was similarly underrated.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: *Early French autuerists, like Eric Rohmer & Claude Chabrol in their Hitchcock monograph THE FIRST FORTY-FOUR FILMS, never considered I CONFESS a minor work, rating it near the top.

PAHA MAA / FROZEN LAND (2005)

This award-winning Finnish pic is like LA RONDE of Misery, a strung together collection of hard luck tales as friends, lovers, fathers & sons, spouses & complete strangers bump into each other’s lives amid the modern morass of cold, cruel life in Finland. It’s both impressive . . . and a bit much, an unending parade of lost jobs, empty cash accounts & broken relationships. What keeps you watching is that director Aku Louhimies is such a natural, a technical sharpie able to handle any mood. From drab realism to glitzy action, plus a straightforward manner that lets wild coincidences seem inevitable instead of the dramatic contrivances they really are. (It's less BABEL/’06 than AMORES PERROS/’00, thank goodness.) He even manages a wisp of gallows humor when an instrument of bloody murder finds a second use in the clean-up. (You’ll feel guilty for laughing.) If only the script didn’t keep hitting the reset button every time things stop looking wretched. The bad turns begin to feel arbitrary.

DOUBLE-BILL: Finland must rival dentistry for suicide rates. Why not an Aki Kaurismäki pic to lighten the mood? He also travels thru darkness, but manages to move toward the light in spite of setbacks & bad karma. Try an early fable like ARIEL/’88 as an antidote to Louhimies’ ultra-Hobbesian view.

THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION (2009)

The long-running Merchant-Ivory brand of civilized cinema found quietus four years after producer Ismail Merchant died; four years before house-scripter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died and two years after director James Ivory finished production and found token distribution for this stillborn pic. It’s the wan story of an untenured Prof who bumbles his way to the Uruguayan estate of a deceased author he has a grant to bio. Cultivating consent from surviving wife Laura Linney, mistress (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother (Anthony Hopkins) turns out to be only half the battle; maintaining interest may be just as hard in spite of (or is it because of?) blunt prompting from his career-oriented g’friend. Some handsome location shooting and messy interdependent personal relationships should provide a reasonably involving literary stroll, but no one behaves like a recognizable human being. Actions, motivations, dialogue, all coming off as forced or idiotic, with the tone of a bad British translation of Chekhov from the ‘50s. Hopkins, playing the dead writer’s world-weary gay older brother, manages to create a character with his usual quirky agogic speaking rhythms. Everyone else sinks. Though none more so than Omar Metwally as the absent-minded Prof, spectacularly inadequate as an object of desire with a doe-like self-regarding manner that curdles as you watch.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: A telling moment in the Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala ROOM WITH A VIEW/’85 finds Maggie Smith & Judi Dench lost on tour in Italy. ‘Throw away your Baedeker,’ suggests adventurous Dench to timid Smith. Figuratively, that’s just what these filmmakers did in their best pics.