KONEC SRPNA V HOTELU OZON / THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1966)

Artsy, minimalist, post-nuclear annihilation blather from The Czech Republic, vague enough to work as an ADD YOUR OWN ALLEGORY HERE vessel. It’s like a Mr. PotatoHead for Ethics Majors; plug in whatever features you need to make your case. No doubt, author Pavel Jurácek & megger Jan Schmidt were aiming for surreptitious commentary on their country’s Soviet dominated regime. (The boiling point of 1968 was well within sight.) But all we get is a rather unpleasant gang of feral young woman, led by an older, not much wiser gal who lived in pre-apocalypse times. (Meaning - A: Pre-USSR domination?; B: Pre-WWII?; C: Pre-nuclear era?; or D: All of the above?) They’re searching the countryside for victuals, supplies, ammo & possible others . . . male others. Even in 1966, this set-up had been worked to death; and it certainly shows no signs of stopping. We watch them kill a few animals along the way (very PETA-unfriendly). Then, after sloshing about in some fresh cow offal, they finally meet a living male specimen. Alas, Grandpa looks too old for procreational use. Worse, he owns an old wind-up gramophone with only one record: a 78 rpm disc of ‘The Beer Barrel Polka.’ Now, that’s a tragedy!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Another smeary transfer of a post WWII Eastern Europe pic from FACETS DVD.

BIG HOUSE, U.S.A.

There’s a veritable convention of classic tough guys in this prison break pic: fast-talking, diesel-powered Broderick Crawford; lumbering Lon Chaney, Jr.; creepy/crafty William Talman (the lawyer who kept losing to Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason), and the hovering, musclebound, shirtless menace of Charles Bronson. But patience, please; we don’t meet these threatening boys till the second act, when Ralph Meeker’s icy, compassion-free kidnapper gets sent up on a lesser charge. Howard Koch, before he become a respectable producer @ Paramount, directed this low-budget sludge-fest with an eye toward violent sensationalism that helps make up for his many deficiencies in staging, pacing and . . . well, in just about everything! And while the era didn’t allow for today’s on-screen depiction of mayhem & gore, the level of sadistic brutality, casual violence & cold-blooded murder might impress Quentin Tarantino. Heck, if everybody wasn’t dead at the end of this one, you might pull out an alternate cast for RESERVOIR DOGS/’92.

DOUBLE-BILL: The granddaddy of prison break pics, THE BIG HOUSE/’30, shows it’s early Talkie age, but in a good way, with smash perfs from Wallace Berry, Chester Morris & a callow Robert Montgomery under George W. Hill’s remarkably fluid helming. (Or, as mentioned above, RESERVOIR DOGS.)

THE LEGO MOVIE (2014)

Much-liked animated fare trips itself up from the get-go, faking a stop-motion look with under-powered CGI. And if ever a subject screamed out for the fanciful limitations of pixilation, it’s the World of LEGO. Still, the basic set-up from writer/directors Christopher Miller & Phil Lord feels right, pitting free-form/anarchic imagination against the rules of discipline & uniformity as Mr. Business (Master of Lego World) threatens to freeze all his pieces in place, while a 'Regular Joe' sort is inadvertently anointed savior by the girl of his dreams. The practical & philosophical implications of this fable have loads of promise, especially when you consider how every LEGO piece works from a base DNA that literally locks together as needed, while also allowing for thousands of mutations. MORAL: It’s the grounded imagination that soars. If only the story didn’t play out like a game of table tennis without a net. The lack of logic is explained in a late inning reveal that might surprise a 7-yr-old (or a fan of Miller & Lord’s HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER), but it’s little more than a cheat that lets them off the hook. Sometimes it’s better to draw inside the lines.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: For some real stop-motion magic the kids may have missed, try CHICKEN RUN/’00 from the Wallace & Gromit folks.

FACE THE MUSIC (aka THE BLACK GLOVE) (1954)

Terence Fisher directed many low-budget films noir for Hammer Films before he began rebooting horror classics in lurid EastmanColor. Alas, this one, in spite of a few tasty bits, feels phoned in. American Alex Nicol is the Big Band trumpet star who becomes a murder suspect after sharing a spaghetti dinner with a jazz singer he’s just met. He goes home; she turns up dead. The rest of the pic finds him roaming about as amateur dick, solving the crime between gigs. Nothing wrong with that set-up, but with little atmosphere, needless voice-over narration, bad acting, not much action or suspense and mood-killing well-lit corridors, it’s awfully weak tea for the genre. There are, however, three amusing oddities in the thing: attempted poisoning by trumpet mouthpiece (Yikes!); flirtation in rhymed couplets (droll, man, droll); and frame-up via 78 rpm record with one jazz man faking the style of another player so the cops’ll connect the wrong guy with the victim. (Neat-O!) Too bad the trumpet playing, by Pop-Jazz stylist Kenny Baker, is so piercing, high & unpleasant. He sounds like Doc Severinsen showing off his chops with a stratospheric high note on the old Johnny Carson TONIGHT SHOW.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Fisher gives better noir in MAN BAIT/’52.

BALL OF FIRE (1941)

Just off his sole Oscar® nom. (for helming the singularly unrepresentative SERGEANT YORK/’41), Howard Hawks segued straight into (of all things) a Billy Wilder comedy (co-scripted w/ Charles Brackett). A very likable film, no matter the authorship, it’s a slangy, wised-up riff on SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS with Barbara Stanwyck’s ‘chanteusey’ hiding from the law courtesy of 7 sweetie-pie professors living together on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (5 West 83rd St.) Plus an 8th, a real Prince Charming of a Professor, tall, hesitant, handsome, unintentionally elegant, naturally sexy . . . why it’s Gary Cooper. The gimmick is that they need Babs to help out with their encyclopedia entry on modern slang; and she secretly needs them to keep her on ice until her mob boyfriend (Dana Andrews) can arrange their marriage so she won’t have to testify against him. Reduced to essentials, we’ve got Jazz musician in trouble hiding out with the opposite sex till things cool down. That’s the basic storyline of Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT/’59; right down to a mention of that film’s motivating trigger, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Hawks is only partially successful at tamping down a major case of the cutes from the professors, but Stanwyck & Cooper smoothly work up a real emotional response with the aid of a stack of books to create a level kissing field. And note how cinematographer Gregg Toland, back on the Sam Goldwyn lot after shooting CITIZEN KANE/’41, pulls off lighting strategies that individualize the professors inside various single compositions.

THE SWAN (1956)

Surprisingly, having Grace Kelly play a Princess on screen in her penultimate pic within days of becoming a Princess for real over in Monaco didn’t put this one over with the public. Yet this adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s wise & witty play has aged with considerable charm & now beats with unexpected emotion. In form, it’s no more than the old Ruritanian romance about a Commoner in love with a Royal. And we all know how that works out: accusations, recrimination, wistful tears, renunciation, quivering chin, stiff upper lip, goodbye forever. But Molnár turns it all into something of a Shavian meditation/exposition on social class and social classes, parsing out the fine points & differences with seen-it-all sanguine Hungarian acceptance and perfectly nuanced & timed character-based humor. Kelly, almost shockingly beautiful under Joseph Ruttenberg’s camera, is the royal catch for Alec Guinness’s amused, but indifferent Crown Prince. Seeing no spark, Princess Mom (Jessie Royce Landis) surmises a rival in Louis Jourdan’s Tutor-of-all-trades to the royal children. And that’s when love, the real thing, starts getting bunted about like some Royal Shuttlecock. Who knew Hollywood vet Charles Vidor could get this level of performance out of so many character eccentrics? Or lay back and let Mittel-Europa splendour speak for itself as backdrop? John Dighton gets sole script credit, but we can’t be very far removed from Maxwell Anderson’s tweaking of Melville Baker’s ‘20s B’way translation for Eva Le Gallienne and the young Basil Rathbone not as the Crown Prince, but as the young tutor. The stage production turned them both into stars, even though Molnár saved his best for the Prince’s final, memorable speech. Something about a swan . . .

THE BOURNE LEGACY (2012)

Writer/helmer Tony Gilroy retools the BOURNE Franchise with more Spy vs Spy nonsense in a template that’s closer to THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR/’75 paranoia than the existential internecine turf wars of the original trilogy. Modestly effective (if you don’t pay much attention), it loses conviction toward the end when Jeremy Renner’s chemically hyped agent heads to Manila with brainy helpmate Rachel Weisz while all those nasty CIA bigwigs remain Stateside, lying to Senate subcommittees & furiously typing on computer keyboards. Worse, the medical rationale used to fuel the plot has the rug pulled out from it just as a previously unknown Bourne 2.0 (a deus ex machina baddie) enters as delaying tactic & ‘chase bait.’ The joke in this set up (and it’s the only joke in here) is that the ‘suits’ inside the film story are trying to shut down the whole BOURNE program, just like many Universal execs must have been arguing to shut down the BOURNE Movie Franchise as having run its course. But hunger for a James Bond style franchise of never-ending profits won out. The film, neither hit nor flop, announced a sequel for 2016. The advertising tagline: There Was Never Just One, a bit specious with Matt Damon returning for another go-round.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: THE BOURNE SUPREMACY/’04 is probably the best of the Doug Liman/Paul Greengrass trilogy with Matt Damon. Still, you’d be a bit lost without first seeing BOURNE IDENTITY/’02; and unfulfilled without BOURNE ULTIMATUM/’07.

FOREVER AMBER (1947)

Kathleen Winsor probably had VANITY FAIR in mind while writing this randy period romp, but the film goes all Scarlett O’Hara and JEZEBEL/’38. Linda Darnell (distractingly blonde, but you get used to it) is Restoration England’s most ambitious vixen, flirting her way onto the lap of society, yet longing only for dashing privateer Cornel Wilde. We’re barely a step & a half above a typical romance novel, but where’s the juicy fun of (say) Margaret Lockwood in THE WICKED LADY/’45? No one seems to connect between the non-stop crises, dealt like a reshuffled deck of story beats from GONE WITH THE WIND/’39. Otto Preminger’s faceless megging doesn’t help though it surely looked better in the original prints. (The Fox Archive DVD is, at best, a dull facsimile of Leon Shamroy’s TechniColor lensing.) And the huge cast holds merely two standouts: George Sanders as a mischievous, dog-loving, sardonic Charles II; and the unfortunate Jane Ball, showstoppingly awful as Wilde’s American bride. So bad, it ended her career as abruptly as this film's pull-the-plug, truncated finish. A big hit just the same.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The time period is different, but Rouben Mamoulian’s VANITY FAIR adaptation, BECKY SHARP/’35, the first 3-strip TechniColor feature, shows how AMBER might have worked. Still waiting for the UCLA Restoration to become available, meanwhile follow the link to see what you’re missing: http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/restoration/becky-sharp-1935-restoration

PHILOMENA (2013)

Over the past three decades, few directors have run up a better batting average than Stephen Frears . . . or gained less credit for doing it; craft & range getting short critical shrift these days; even critical suspicion. That said, this undoubted success does feel a bit thin at times, betraying its provenance as a magazine feature that’s been puffed up to book length. A fact-inspired story, sadly familiar, about Irish Catholic practices & prudery involving unwed mothers, forced labor, and bartered babies. With lovely, often very funny playing by co-writer/co-producer Steve Coogan as the reporter, and by Judi Dench who makes Philomena as shrewd & blunt as she is trusting & naive. Any loss in narrative stride when the search for her long-lost son falls into Coogan’s laptop is overcome by the decency & emotion of its double climax of discovery & confrontation. It provides an honest emotional kick in answering the film’s (and a film-goer’s) prayers.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Shocking as this is, and shocking as the current priestly sex scandals are, any internet search will bring up noxious rationales & defenders by various apologists for the church. Suffice it to say, Philomena’s story is entirely believable even when you can see it being nudged into digestible form.

DOUBLE-BILL: For less benevolent confirmation on Irish-Catholic practices for ‘fallen women,’ see THE MAGDALENE SISTERS/’02.