THE TWO MRS. CARROLLS (1947)

Something got lost when this comic-thriller went from stage (a year & a half on B’way) to screen. Under director Peter Godfrey, it goes THUD in the night. Humphrey Bogart’s a morbidly talented artist with a wife, an alarmingly precocious kid and Barbara Stanwyck as his blindsided mistress. She’s shocked to find out he’s married, but once the old wife croaks they start their own peachy-creamy life, until Alexis Smith gets all neighborly, offering herself as a new inspirational canvas for Bogie. Now, it’s Stanwyck’s turn to go all woozy after drinking the nightly glass of milk her husband brings up before beddy-bye. (People sure drank a lot of milk back in the day.) Godfrey would bring much the same Po-faced sincerity to his next film, CRY WOLF/’47, this time with Stanwyck & Errol Flynn, and a much more even tone. Here, everyone seems to lose confidence in the piece as it goes along. At least, Bogie gets to pull out all the stops in the last reel before going out with a decidedly goofy curtain line, nailing the boneheaded tone everyone’s been searching for.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: For Stanwyck in hysterical invalid mode, there’s always SORRY, WRONG NUMBER/’48, though it’s not a patch on the original radio drama with Agnes Moorehead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r5GZral6zs (Even better is the parody version of same w/ Stanwyck & Jack Benny, but it’s hard to find.)

INDAGINE SU UN CITTADINO AL DI OGNI SOSPETO / INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION (1970)

Now out in a spiffed up 4K restoration, Elio Petri’s award-winning/calling-card pic remains a purposefully hard nut to crack. It’s not, as you might expect, the story of a high ranking official too important to tag with a crime, but a chilly parable on behavior & consequences. A big city Head of Homicide, just upped to the Political Division, murders his mistress mid-coitus, then carefully leaves a self-revealing trail so he’ll be found out, and still get away scot-free. It’s CRIME AND NO PUNISHMENT, with an end-title quote from Kafka, though both references are misdirections, at best. If anything, it’s an up-to-the-minute Brechtian-style farce lifted to the ‘70s and translated by Dario Fo: call it ENTITLEMENT ITALIAN STYLE. To which, Petri adds an off-putting in-your-face camera technique, haranguing cascades of dialogue and a cast of characters you’d be happy to lose in a crowd. It all sounds more interesting, more accomplished than Petri, a less-than-meets-the-eye filmmaker, more provocateur than auteur, was able to make of it. Little of his small output came to the States, but INVESTIGATION retains an unlikable integrity that fitfully keeps it alive.

DOUBLE-BILL: With the same leading actor (Gian Maria Volonté) and similar concerns, Marco Bellocchio’s SLAP THE MONSTER ON PAGE ONE/’72 pivots from cops to newspapers for a more nuanced perspective on corrupt officialdom and misplaced guilt. But like Petri, Bellocchio’s Stateside rep boils down to a single film, in Bellocchio’s case his debut pic, FISTS IN THE POCKET/’65, an astonishment he could never quite live down . . . or up to. For the moment, other work is hard to find.

SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (1947)

The last and least of four films Fritz Lang made with Joan Bennett suffers all sorts of woes, but especially from the German director’s growing Hitchcock envy. The story structure may have been pulled out of Bela Bartok’s BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE opera, but it’s heavily seasoned with swipes out of REBECCA/’40 and SPELLBOUND/’45. Alas, something went very wrong along the way and it all plays out like some Freudian text with herky-jerky reactions from what on paper looks to be an excellent cast: Bennett; Michael Redgrave in his Stateside debut; Anne Revere; Barbara O’Neil; Natalie Schafer; and a smashing ‘off’ adolescent perf from Mark Dennis as a resentful step-son. The story sends Joan Bennett on a long trip after she comes into her inheritance. There, she recklessly meets & marries a near stranger (Redgrave) who neglects to tell her about his step son, his late wife, his financial troubles or his collection of preserved historic rooms of death and murder thru the ages. What? Yes, a little underground museum in his estate, but with one room permanently locked. What could possibly be in there? Er, Rochester’s mad wife? The whole situation is simply too bizarre to work, and Lang’s abrupt handling of his cast adds plenty of unintended guffaws. (To be fair, a new studio administration hacked away at Lang’s original cut.) Odd as this all is, and the film was a commercial & critical disaster for Lang, the goofy thing builds considerable suspense in the third act, much helped by bringing forward Miklos Rozsa compelling score. (Rozsa doesn’t call on the theremin as he did on SPELLBOUND, but something strange is going on with the instrumentation. Reversed tracks in the orchestral mix? Probably not, but that’s what it sounds like.)

DOUBLE-BILL: MAN HUNT/’41; WOMAN IN THE WINDOW/’44 and SCARLET STREET/’45 are the other Bennett/Lang pics.

THE LONE RANGER (2013)

When a film grosses a billion dollars, it’s bound to leave a mark on its maker. And when a crap sequel, one of those titles you don’t so much want to see as want to have seen, pulls in that kind of loot, reactions can confound a career. A Catastrophe of Success of the sort that may have stymied the Wachowski Siblings when their two unloved MATRIX sequels churned out big bucks before they promptly landed in shitsville with SPEED RACER/’08; CLOUD ATLAS/’12 and possibly the newly delayed JUPITER ASCENDING.* Is this what happened on this ludicrously over-produced Western, a chillingly expensive vanity project for the star (Johnny Depp) & helmer (Gore Verbinski) of the increasingly useless (if profitable) PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN series? The kicker is that these two had a charming, eccentric success with their off-kilter animated Western, RANGO/’11. Maybe the blame lies with mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, exiled off the Disney campus after this tanked. And what an odd, joyless, film they all made, as if excess, in and of itself, were funny, exciting, memorable. There’s no human contact in the thing, with Armie Hammer a near blank as the Ranger, unmemorable villains, lackluster heroine, and all the action set-pieces lifeless, laughless, suspense-free Rube Goldberg contraptions encrusted in CGI. With an ending out of Spielberg’s TINTIN/’11, plot & structure freely sampled from LITTLE BIG MAN/’70 and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST/’68, the best thing in the film is a simple little number that finds our heroes spooking the badguys with shadows & lanterns in a mine shaft. Maybe Verbinski will find the soul of his next pic in there, too.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: As mentioned above, RANGO.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: *We’re lifting the phrase, The Catastrophe of Success, from Joseph McBride’s fascinating, if overly bitter, Frank Capra bio.

THE GRANDMASTER (2013)

About an hour into Kar Wai Wong’s stylish bio-pic on the life & times of Ip Man, Kung Fu Master: Wing Chun Division, Ip lands in post-WWII Hong Kong. Approaching middle-age, Ip finds himself less a man without a country than a man without Martial Arts cred. In a battle that would reestablish his bona fides, Ip faces off against ‘The Razor,’ a Kung Fu rebel-with-an-edge, a straight edge. The fight may be vicious, but the musical accompaniment on the soundtrack is not. Instead, an orchestral version of ‘Casta Diva,’ the great soprano aria from Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece NORMA. That’s when the film’s design clicks firmly into place; it’s a Bel Canto Martial Arts pic.* At least, that’s the idea. But with two & a half reels lopped off and structural reshuffling by the Weinstein Company as ransom for a Stateside release, it’s impossible to know if Wong’s brought it off. The first hour sticks to Ip Man’s rise against the masters of various Martial Arts disciplines in pre-WWII China; his subsumed passion toward Gong Er, the beautiful daughter of the past GrandMaster; and the quick destruction of his world as Japanese occupation takes hold. The rest of the film, now set in 1950s Hong Kong, takes on the crossed paths of Ip and Gong Er, now a practicing physician. Suddenly, her backstory moves front & center, but the flashback structure feels shoehorned in. The Weinstein cut (it’s all boxes-within-boxes) clarifies narrative at the cost of sucking emotion, wonder and excitement out of the film. Even as is, Tony Chiu Wai Leung is a rock as Ip Man and no doubt the original cut will eventually show up. ('The Weinstein Company Presents the Much Anticipated Kar Wai Wong Director’s Cut! Sorry, no refunds for already buying the earlier botched edition.') Oh well, it’s worth a second viewing.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Bel Canto: literally ‘Beautiful Song;’ but in practice, bel canto's traditional vocal acrobatics are merely the starting point for an attitude toward lyric-drama that uses perfect vocal technique (ease, flexibility & brilliance) to get to the heart of things. Hmm, sounds like advice from a Kung Fu master.

THE SECRET AGENT (1996)

British playwright Christopher Hampton added director to his usual writing credit on this Joseph Conrad adaptation, his second shot as hyphenate. A fascinating Dostoevsky-like tale of foreign born or influenced anarchists in 1880s London, the story had been brilliantly modernized by Hitchcock for the jittery 1930s as SABOTAGE/’36 (aka THE WOMAN ALONE).* But while Hampton is more faithful to Conrad, his film, in spite of a generally excellent cast, compelling action and strong period detail, is much less successful. As director, Hampton seems unable (unwilling?) to vary the pace or take advantage of the suspense built into the premise, the film never gets into gear. The opening is promising with Bob Hoskins hosting a small group of socialist malcontents, agitators, Fabians & anarchists in his flat while his wife, an uncomfortable Patricia Arquette, and her mentally damaged kid brother (Christian Bale), help her Mom pack up to move. Surprisingly, for those who know the Hitchcock pic, it’s not an especially unhappy household, but as Hoskins finds himself pulled in various directions by officials digging for explosive info; foreign embassy types pressing for that big bang against British confidence; and underground bomb-makers dreaming of self-destruction (a stunning little perf from Robin Williams); he starts to crack, clinging to the younger wife he may have completely misread. Obviously, you can’t entirely miss the mark with this level of material, the situation literally detonates with drama. But Hampton might as well be helming underwater, accompanied by the repetitive music patterns of Philip Glass on the soundtrack.

DOUBLE-BILL: *There’s always been confusion on the Hitchcock pic since he used the title SECRET AGENT on his first film of 1936 which was taken from Somerset Maugham’s ‘Ashenden.’ His Conrad adaptation, also 1936, came out in Britain as SABOTAGE and then was retitled THE WOMAN ALONE for Stateside audiences. BEWARE of Public Domain issues on this one; stick to the fine Criterion DVD.

BARBARA (2012)

In this German art-house suspenser, story-beats, like the fog, come in on little cat feet, but come they do. It’s 1980 East Germany, and Barbara (Nina Hoss), a doctor under political suspicion and STASI surveillance, lands at a provincial hospital. With a dashing West German lover who sneaks in for visits, she carries an air of wary indifference to her new assignment while plotting to flee West. But a growing attachment to some of her patients, and a soulful staff doctor may get in the way. Director Christian Petzold does a neat job on this slow-burn thriller, catching the paranoid times & personal humiliations without constant nudging. But while those narrative story beats add pace & a pervading sense of threat to Barbara’s maddening, if understandable stoicism, it also makes some of the tricky plot turns come off as a little too neat & tidy, like a ‘well-made’ play from the ‘40s. As the good doctor, Nina Hoss can’t always parse the diffident rudeness of her thrice-burned character from looking like she’s just a bit slow-on-the-uptake. But Ronald Zehrfeld, as the sadder-but-wiser chief hospital doctor, drawn to the woman under Barbara’s hard shell, is a real find; the most sympathetic German leading-man in decades. Hollywood, snap this guy up!

DOUBLE-BILL: The great, recent German morality pic on STASI is THE LIVES OF OTHERS/’06 from Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck, sadly, still licking his wounds after THE TOURIST/’10 and waiting on his next project.

GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE (1968)

On anyone’s shortlist of great cinematographers, Jack Cardiff also directed some quality pics. This wasn’t one of them. Very French New Wave, though more voyeuristic Roger Vadim than Cahiers du Cinéma intellectual, with Rolling Stones muse Marianne Faithfull taking on the Brigitte Bardot sexy-number spot by taking off her clothes. (A censored Stateside release was retitled NAKED UNDER LEATHER.) Working at her Dad’s book shop, Faithfull turns unfaithful on her Milquetoast British fiancé when sexy customer Alain Delon whisks her away for lessons in love & motorcycles. It’s ecstacy²! That’s about it plotwise, as Cardiff jazzes things up with blasts of solarized color for a Swinging ‘Sixties psychedelic edge. And it just might work as a Mod mood piece if only Faithfull weren’t so hopeless on screen. Whatever magic she had in real life gets lost in translation. Period detail and unintentional giggles hold some interest, especially a well-placed bouquet of roses that keeps Delon decent before bursting into Red Solarized Sensations when he gets aroused. Oh, Alain! You naughty, naughty beautiful boy!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Much more fun if you switch to the Cardiff Commentary audio-track.

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (2013)

With many editions undoubtedly in the pipeline (Extended Cut; Director’s Cut; Complete Trilogy; 3D; Home Study), it’s still possible to note that the initial DVD release of the second film in Peter Jackson’s HOBBIT extrapolation trilogy holds unexpected delight. The tone has been lightened, the pace zips along with delightful character readings & battle scenes that hold powerful mass against fantastic flair. All a dedicated HOBBIT maven might wish for. Until you realize you’ve been enjoying an auto-loaded ad for LEGO: The Hobbit Game. Oops! Then the actual film starts up with all the self-important ballast, ponderous CGI and endurance test length of the first HOBBIT pic. No doubt, those already hooked will make merry with the results, eating up each of its 161 minutes. Indeed, four or five of its set pieces are excitingly worked out, even if the climatic use of molten gold looks like instant butterscotch pudding. But heavens, what would J.R.R. Tolkien have made of the GAME OF THRONES tilt given his fable? On the acting front, Martin Freeman’s Bilbo is holding up well (looking more than ever like Timothy Q. Mouse from DUMBO/’41 as rendered by Rembrandt), and Benedict Cumberbatch, his boss over at BBC’s SHERLOCK, makes a grand vocal addition as Smaug-the-Dragon. While, Ian McKellen and poor Orlando Bloom seem all used up.

DOUBLE-BILL: If you’re going to bother, best start with THE HOBBIT: An Unexpected Adventure/’12 which (surprise!) has been repackaged with 13 additional minutes.