UN TAXI POUR TOBROUK / TAXI FOR TOBRUK (1961)

Locally popular French WWII dramedy is a mediocrity, double-dipped in obvious ironic twists of fate right up to a surprise ending that’s more insulting than existential. The set up plops four French soldiers and a German officer in a small truck with limited supplies somewhere in the North African desert. And with Field Marshal Rommel in retreat, its not clear which side controls the nearest supplies stations. So, which way to go? Hard to figure out when your nominal prisoner, German officer Hardy Krüger, is the best informed guy in the group. FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX/’65 fans will enjoy seeing Krüger doing a trial run for the later pic, though any comparison in character complexity does this film no favors, while the French quartet includes the likes of Charles Aznavour & Lino Ventura in reasonable form. But Denys de La Patellière megs with such little imagination that the vast desert holds no mystery, and even a mine field brings little drama to the party.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: How to explain the film’s hometown rep? Perhaps French audiences, weary of WWII dramas w/ Vichy collaborators & resistance heroes simply longed for a battlefield story with grunts in non-green berets.

TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA (1970)

This, the second of five pics shared by no-nonsense helmer Don Siegel and no-nonsense actor Clint Eastwood, should be better known. A very tall tale from Budd Boetticher, with a sharp, funny script from Albert Maltz, it spots Shirley MacLaine as a nun-on the-run in the middle of Revolutionary Mexico. She ‘meets-cute’ with Clint when he saves her from a trio of rapists, then gloms on to him for protection & retribution against the French Occupying forces hunting her down. He’s less interested in honor & nation-building than in a loot-filled strongbox he hopes to find at the finish line. The pic has the inappropriate grisly humor, sturdy narrative drive and clean, readable action you expect from Siegel, joined to stylish color lensing from the great b&w stylist Gabriel Figueroa and an exceptional score from Ennio Morricone. It all gives the film a plush feel & a lux finish Siegel rarely bothered with. But don’t worry, when the big fort attack comes, Siegel puts up a fugue of wartime destruction, a battle in counterpoint with every moving part showing.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: MacLaine and Siegel made a tough match. But when he’d had enough and walked off the pic, she started making nice to get him back on set. Look for their ‘before-and-after’ moment about an hour into the film. The ‘tell’ is when she stops using mascara. Suddenly, Shirl pulls back a bit, relaxes, and turns in a much improved perf. Lots more in A SIEGEL FILM, Siegel’s no-nonsense working auto-bio.

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA (2013)

Generously greeted tv pic (theatrical abroad), immaculately helmed by Steven Soderbergh, and remarkably uninteresting. The saga of aging ivory-tickler Liberace and blond boy-toy Scott Thorson has few surprises: Campy entertainer lands his latest 20-something, but moves on when the youthifying pixie dust fails to rub off. A couple of bizarre incidents add color, especially when a taut-faced Rob Lowe shows up as a feel-good plastic surgeon, but in spite of numerous awards & nominations, the two leads are crucially, even cruelly, miscast. Matt Damon is supposed to be a teenage object of lustful affection, but well into his 40s, he looks slow on the uptake rather than hot, young & innocent. (Great ass though!) Michael Douglas gets all the non-essentials right, but can’t bring the flamboyant Liberace to life. When he walks on stage nothing happens; he doesn’t connect. Where’s Mr. Showmanship? The wardrobe’s in place, but none of the flair. The costumes might be wearing him. (See Hugh Jackman as Peter Allen to see what’s missing.) Douglas certainly got the reviews; chucking your personal vanity and smooching Matt Damon will do the trick for a mainstream movie star. Though, with Damon looking just like a ‘70s Kristy McNichols, how hard was it to pucker up?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: A year after Liberace died, Victor Garber played him in a tv movie before grabbing his next role the very same year in another tv bio . . . Ernest Hemingway, natch.

FASHIONS OF 1934 (1934)

You know from the exposed navels (and three nude inches below!) that this came out a few months before the Hollywood Production Code clamped down on such naughtiness. But the rest of the crazed fashion spectacular stuffed inside this silly little comedy speaks in the uncensorable code of Warners dance master Busby Berkeley. A typically OTT musical ‘numbo,’ it begins with 200 Lovely Models with strapped on feathers astride figureheaded harps, like some mad S&M chorus line. Soon, the camera takes flight for an overhead shot of phallus & orifice consecration rites as models below manipulate ostrich plumes into a pulsating facsimile of a flower bud that opens its petals to reveal an erect, penetrating model. Yikes! Did Georgia O’Keeffe faint . . . or sue? Oh, there’s also a little movie plot surrounding this insanity, ‘the ‘Story of a Gay Rascal Who Fooled 50 Million French Women!,’ according to the trailer. Oo-la-la!! That’d be William Powell, on the cusp of a career-saving move from Warners to M-G-M. Here, he's a broke promoter who gets struggling fashion designer Bette Davis to help him steal the latest Paris designs before they leave the couturier salons. There’s help from Hugh Herbert’s soused ostrich farmer and Verree Teasdale’s phony Russian Countess. (How could you possibly be phony with that name?) Together, they fend off the lousy French accent of that veddy, veddy British actor Reginald Owen, along with a plot that can’t decide on any particular storyline. All good fun if you’re in the proper mood.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The print used for the Warner Archive VOD must have been from a re-release that reduced the title to FASHIONS. No doubt Warners, licking its wounds after seeing Powell reclaim major stardom in M-G-M’s THIN MAN, wanted to squeeze this one dry with post-1934 bookings.

CHICO & RITA (2010)

The jazzy rhythms of pre-Castro Cuba & some Bebop stylings from ‘50s NYC work nicely with the stripped down animation in this bumpy love story between piano-man Chico and his dream vocalist Rita. But after the visual & musical peak of a car ride thru the streets of pre-Revolutionary Havana, the pic gets waylaid & weighed down by an over-determined storyline of missed personal & professional opportunities. It’s always hard to pinpoint blame in the ensemble creative world of animated features, but co-writer/co-director Fernando Trueba of the similarly overpraised/over-awarded BELLE EPOQUE/’92 makes a likely culprit. There’s a lot of MAMBO KINGS/’92 in here, but even more of Martin Scorsese’s NEW YORK, NEW YORK/’77, none of it helpful. That goes double for Chico, nearly as loathsome as Robert De Niro's sullen sax playing swine, while Rita gets heartbreak from the lives of Dorothy Dandridge & Rita Moreno, falling into a life of slutty victimization. Whatever were they thinking? Best let your mind go blank during the trashy dramatics and focus on the graphic design & jivey music.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: 2003's TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE gets all this stuff right.

WESTERN UNION (1941)

Fritz Lang had no sooner finished his JESSE JAMES/’39 sequel, THE RETURN OF FRANK JAMES/’40, when 20th/Fox assigned him another Western. The title’s from Zane Grey, but this is an ultra-traditional horse opera, awash in flaming TechniColor, savage drunken In’juns, bouncing chuck wagon, telegraph poles marching Westward Ho!, and a rivalry between Randolph Scott’s classic ‘Good Badman’ and Robert Young’s rich Eastern tenderfoot, competing for leadership on the line & in romance with blandly pretty Virginia Gilmore. And damned if it ain’t one fine show, not so far off the C. B. DeMille model of UNION PACIFIC/’39, but lighter on its feet. In fact, the whole pic has a real Hollywood swing to it, quite at odds with the UFA æsthetic Lang usually cultivated. But as a German exile, where the myth of the Wild West looms large, Lang must have taken lots of pleasure simply in making a big outdoorsy Western. You can feel his enthusiasm coursing thru Edward Cronjager’s gorgeous location lensing and in some relaxed perfs from Scott, Young and the tasty supporting cast. All capped off with a series of neatly handled action set pieces and a dandy shootout finale that’s clean as a blueprint diagram, but heaps more exciting.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: A passion for geometric patterns made Lang a natural for Native American art, touring Indian Reservation sites during production. But, as Patrick McGilligan notes in his Lang bio, THE NATURE OF THE BEAST, after Lang finished shooting, Fox honcho Darryl F. Zanuck ordered up much of the most offensive In’jun footage. Zanuck also takes the blame for bumping up Slim Summerville’s tiresome comic-relief shtick as a scaredy-cat cook. Welcome to the studio-system, Fritz!

ZORBA THE GREEK (1964)

After playing every ethnicity under the sun (and largely getting away with it in spite of a fairly mundane Irish-Mexican heritage), Anthony Quinn found his signature role playing an aging iconic Greek life-force who attaches himself as major-domo to Englishman-abroad Alan Bates. The over-familiar theme may be ‘Life’s a banquet, and most poor bastards are starving to death,’ but writer/director Michael Cacoyannis (Mihalis Kakogiannis) avoids turning out a macho AUNTIE MAME by emphasizing the savagery & strangeness found in Crete’s land, people & rituals.* And if he can’t quite avoid the ethnological clichés of Family of Man portraiture, he certainly isn’t afraid of overstatement or of getting his hands dramatically dirty. Against so many larger-than-life characters, Bates is the real miracle in the film, finding size & scope inside his quieter character. The story sets him up as needing to shake up a mundane literary life, yet he’s really the most daring fellow in the pic, hiring Zorba to pilot his future on little more than a whim. The dramatic climaxes are mostly back-loaded, which gives you plenty of time to appreciate Walter Lassally’s gorgeous b&w cinematography. And if the big set pieces don’t always convince, those terrifying harpies who swoop in after a death are likely to haunt your dreams, along with one of the great cinematic friendship epiphanies waiting to take your breath away at the very end along with that famous music cue.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *ZORBA did indeed get domesticated for B’way consumption as a musical. And was successfully revived as a cutey-pie act for the tone-deaf Quinn.

SNABBA CASH / EASY MONEY

With career-boosting turns from helmer Daniel Espinosa & lead Joel Kinnaman, two fast sequels, a rumored English-Language remake and Martin Scorsese slapping his imprimatur on for a Stateside release*, you expect a bit more than this formulaic man-in-the-middle drug-run gone wrong mob tale. At least, the set-up brings out a couple of nice plot twists as striving college Econ Major Kinnaman drools at his chance to drop his chump-change cabbie job and join the Scandinavian upper-crust. He’s already got the looks, and it just so happens that his cab outfit boss sidelines in drug smuggling. And, wouldn’t you just know, one of his rich new pals is scion of a struggling bank looking for some fresh bigtime cash flow . . . no questions asked. Alas, the drug dealers come in two deadly varieties: Stocky, dark, hairy Arabs; Stocky, dark, hairy Serbs. That makes Kinnaman, lean, blond, smooth to the touch, just the finance-savvy guy they need to make connections. But whom can he trust?, and whose side does he play on when an internecine war starts up? It’s a situation that’s grown cable-weary, with actors too pleased at their own crowd-pleasing ticks. But Espinosa shows real talent at quiet moments, letting things flow naturally. The rest is the usual faux-adrenalin hand-held bobble, interrupted by big action set-pieces that are all sound & fury, missing the pleasures of watching a thing happen.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Marty’s fans didn’t show and the sequels never opened theatrically over here.

KUROI KAWA / BLACK RIVER (1957)

Revered in Japan, director Masaki Kobayashi never quite broke thru Stateside, and the recent spate of DVDs from Criterion are unlikely to change things. Certainly not BLACK RIVER, an ill-shaped tale of down-and-outers falling by the wayside during Japan’s post-war recovery. We watch thru the eyes of a passive 20-something student who’s rented a room in a squalid warehouse that’s been partitioned into separate living spaces. With his studies constantly interrupted by marital feuds, dying or spying neighbors, horndogs from the nearby U.S. military base & other unwanted guests, he finds himself in the unlikely position of romantic rival for a pretty waitress against a slick, dangerous gang boss (Tatsuya Nakadai). Kobayashi has an abrupt style that keeps cutting away from the action (kineticus interruptus), while letting his cast erupt at will. But the sordid scene and the sheer level of misery, envy & backstabbing retribution offer a certain grim fascination. The political pay-offs & corruption shown are regrettable, yet Kobayashi must know we can’t mourn the inevitable destruction of this dank world.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Kurosawa worked similar terrain to fine effect in his Gorky adaptation, THE LOWER DEPTHS/’57 with Toshiro Mifune. And the Jean Renoir version from ‘36 is even better, with great perfs from Jean Gabin & Louis Jouvet.