SCANDAL SHEET (1952)

Phil Karlson’s extra-tasty film noir, tabloid fodder from Samuel Fuller’s 1944 novel THE DARK PAGE*, barely puts a foot wrong in a tight 82-minutes. Brusque & blunt, Broderick Crawford stars as an editor using shock tactics (gruesome pics, lonely hearts club balls, sex scandals) to revive a once dowdy big-city rag. He’s even got his own personally mentored tiger-cub reporter digging up lowdown scoops (disconcertingly pretty John Derek). But his circulation stunts are about to blow up in Crawford’s pug-ugly face when a lonely-hearts gal turns up from his own past, kicking off a downward spiral of blackmail, death, cover-up & bowery bum murder. And it’s his own favorite reporter/surrogate son who’s hot on the trail. He’s proud of the kid; and terrified of being found out. Donna Reed, a leftover reporter from the previous staff, is fine as Derek’s girlfriend/conscience, but standout turns come from Rosemary DeCamp & Henry O’Neill as a doomed pair of life’s losers. Shot by Burnett Guffey with the photo-journalist flair of Weegee covering a professional hit at a tenement walk-up, this big city thriller is served neat, no chaser.

DOUBLE-BILL: The original posters pushed this as a follow-up to THE MOB/’51, a pretty good Robert Parrish pic that puts Crawford’s undercover cop on the waterfront. Great first half (with a terrific, young Richard Kiley), less so after that, but worth a look.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *What might Fuller have made of his own book? Next year’s PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET/’53 shows him at his writing/directing best, but B-pic specialist Karlson is a tough guy to beat.

LA ROUE / THE WHEEL (1923)

Now remembered largely for the mad/magnificent late silent NAPOLEON/’27, this previous work from writer/director Abel Gance was actually more influential (Kurosawa to Eisenstein) & more widely seen at the time. Reduced, even then, to a running time of about two hours from its original seven, Lobster’s 2008 DVD edition has miraculously bulked it back up 4+, with Robert Israel’s fine score helping to bring out its epic qualities.* It’s a big, clunky melodrama that gets the wheel rolling with an opening train crash that orphans a little girl who is then taken home by Séverin-Mars’s railwayman, raised as his daughter and playmate for his son. Both men will fall in love with her, but she’ll marry a rich older man thinking this will help them financially. From a series of small domestic miscues, Gance makes something visually epic & tragic, tying man & machine; landscape & weather to fate, a mixture of Hugo & Hardy, held together by a cinematic dazzle far ahead & far removed from Gance’s Victorian narrative sensibilities. D. W. Griffith followed a similar recipe, but where he was technically advanced for the day; Gance was advanced for now, awesomely so. Part One has most of the traditional narrative, but Part Two is even more extraordinary with the remaining plot elements cleared up in the first two reels. For the rest, about an hour’s running time, there’s little to watch but Severin-Mars slowly losing his sight at a glacial pace while ‘daughter’ Ivy Close tries to reenter his life. A combination of the numb & the sublime unlike anything else in film; until Gance sets up one final turn of the wheel that becomes one of the great privileged moments in cinema.

DOUBLE-BILL/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The following year, Erich von Stroheim’s GREED/’24 was finished at a similar length (7+ hours), and eventually whittled down to two, just like this film. But GREED never was shown at full length, not even in a lost interim cut, prepared at Stroheim’s personal request by director Rex Ingram and running more or less as long as this new restoration of LA ROUE. Even at this length, LA ROUE shows odd continuity gaps and fistfuls of false endings toward the close of Part One. But the film feels complete. Something that can’t be said of an attempt to fill in the missing pieces of GREED with production stills. You’re better off with original 2 hour release. And Rex Ingram’s interim edit? . . . what a loss.

GRANDMA (2015)

The best thing about Paul Weitz’s well-reviewed character dramedy is finding a Pro-Choice film that neither cops out nor trivializes the main issue. (He does stick in a sweet Pro-Life tyke to throw a nasty comic punch at Lily Tomlin, but still . . . )*  If only there was more to celebrate. Tomlin (aging lesbian poet/lit prof/cranky paper-tiger) has just broken up with a much younger girlfriend when her knocked-up teenage granddaughter comes a’knockin’. The girl needs cash for an abortion and (wouldn’t you know it) Tomlin’s cut all her credit cards into pieces. (Apparently, no one’s heard of calling for a replacement card.) So these two tough cookies (one crunchy, one chewy) drive around town, hoping to dig up the funds they need from an assortment of possible cash cows: pimply boyfriend, ex-lover from a hetero past, et al., and finally, the girl’s disapproving mom. Weitz misjudges our interest in this motley gang, and their ability to sustain a narrative. Worse, when in doubt, he goes long & cute, his usual fallback position. Tomlin earns a few honest, uncomfortable laughs, mostly when she’s on the move in her vintage car. But when settled down for extended scenes with real actors , like Sam Elliott as an old flame or Marcia Gay Harden as her powerhouse all-business daughter (she’s the girl’s mother), Tomlin’s sketch-based/multi-character background training leaves her at a huge disadvantage. She all but disappears, along with the goodwill Weitz is counting on to make this work.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *We're slapping a Family Friendly label on this precisely because the film gives such a fair, non-judgmental look at the sort of routine abortion practice no one bothers to dramatize in commercial American movies these days.

IL CONFORMISTA / THE CONFORMIST (1970)

A new restoration of Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece (out on Raro Video) does his later work few favors. Made under the supervision of Bertolucci and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, the corrected picture accentuates a balance in form & content which leaves his other pics either straining for effect (say, 1900/’76) or coasting on pure visual dazzle (like LITTLE BUDDHA/’93). Told in his preferred non-linear style, some puzzling elements only come into focus on a second viewing, but you’ll hardly mind. The movie is a 1930s political fever-dream, with Jean-Louis Trintignant’s wary Italian Fascist honeymooning in Paris, while awaiting for word on his assignment against a former professor, now a major figure in the French Popular Front. But Trintignant’s conflicted nature, shown with striking clarity by Bertolucci in vivid dips into his past*, threaten any foreordained conclusion. Under another director, the film might have played out as a series of bravura set pieces (the ballroom dance, an assassination in the snowy woods, a nightmarish walk thru Rome at war’s end); instead, momentum accumulates as we get to know the characters & situations from different angles. It all looks more thrillingly modern than ever.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Where many directors would signify the past by fading to b&w or toning down color saturation, Bertolucci does the opposite to show how memory can be heightened thru time.

THE OKLAHOMAN (1957)

Forget the movie; enjoy the poster! This is one of those dull Westerns Joel McCrea made in the ’50s before a final return to form in Sam Peckinpah’s RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY/’62. The shame is that this little programmer holds a decent idea for an oater, but is done in by the dull megging of tv hack Francis D. Lyon. McCrea’s a widowed doctor, raising his young daughter in a growing Oklahoma town that needs strong leadership if it’s going to reach the next step in civilization. But when oil shows up on an Indian’s farm, and the town biggest landowner uses his posse to try and steal it away, someone’s gotta take a stand. If only McCrea’s motives weren’t under suspicion from that sexy Native American housekeeper he’s got in the house, young enough to be another daughter. She’s sure hit the jealousy nerve of well-to-do estate owner Barbara Hale, a proper lady who thought she had a clear path to the very available doc. Even with a brown hazy tinge on the print, this is not without some promise. Oh well, at least , Lyon does well by the final shoot-out.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: In ‘55, McCrea made a pair of these modest Westerns for director Jacques Tourneur (STRANGER ON HORSEBACK; WICHITA/’55). Not seen here, but Tourneur rarely misses.

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944)

Though he never regained the commanding position of his German/UFA heyday, Fritz Lang hit a considerable Hollywood peak on a pair of companion pics for Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett & Dan Duryea, with Milton Krasner as lighting cameraman. WOMAN, long favored over follow-up SCARLET STREET/’45, now gets treated like the A-side of a 45 rpm record over-taken by its own ‘B-side.’ Rightfully so, as SCARLET is Lang’s Stateside masterpiece, a film so stylistically all-of-a-piece (call it Hollywood UFA), even its flaws work in its favor. Brutally conceived where this film is smooth & polished, their flipped reps now beg for a bit of defensive action. In a plot that might have inspired THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH/’55, Eddie G. sends his family off on holiday while settling down to a middle-aged bachelor routine at his club with two pals (a doctor & Raymond Massey’s D.A.). But then he meets glamorous Joan Bennett while admiring her portrait, only to share a drink, a murder, a cover-up & blackmail as his D.A. friend starts to circle in on him. A nightmare scenario played many times since, for suspense or for laughs, but rarely with such expert control of all film’s elements. When Lang gets cookin’, he’s tough to beat.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, SCARLET STREET, in decent physical shape on KINO. OR: A recent no-frills M-G-M release pairs WOMAN with another classic Eddie G. suspenser, Orson’s Welles’ most conventional pic, THE STRANGER/’46. Both sourced from sharp, handsome prints.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: By us! Wrote this up, to nearly identical effect, about seven years back. The Seven Year Itch to Rewrite?

CASSE-TÊTE CHINOIS / CHINESE PUZZLE (2013)

Writer/director Cédric Klapisch catches up on characters he’s been tracking since L’AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE/’02 and RUSSIAN DOLLS/’05 (neither seen here) in this too-cute-for-words Woody Allen wannabe. Think ANNIE HALL/’77 with a downtown vibe in for the Upper East Side. (And a multi-ethnic crowd on the sidewalk when Klapisch rips off the romantic dash thru the streets that ended MANHATTAN/’79.) It’s a sexed-up roundelay about a popular French author who follows his wife & kids to NYC after they split. And what whimsical adventures he falls into! Sperm donor to lesbian pal; bike messenger for street-cred philosophizing, with prompting from dead philosopher ghosts; a pop-up Chinese bride to finesse his tourist visa into a permanent one; a walk-up Chinatown apartment for the kids to redecorate; adorable Audrey Tautou visiting with two adorable kids to match his two adorable kids. For a while, it’s fun to see a Frenchman giving the city such an open-hearted hug, but how this sticky thing got such a warm reception is anyone’s guess. Maybe the first two entries were less cloying. (Don’t look here to find out.)

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Stagy & over-written, but something about A THOUSAND CLOWNS/65, also about an unconventional writer raising a kid in NYC, sticks with you. OR: Al Pacino out of his comfort zone as a sit-com dad in the weirdly unconvincing AUTHOR! AUTHOR!/’82.

MR BEAN'S HOLIDAY (2007)

After waiting a decade for Rowan Atkinson to bring his anarchic creation back to the big screen, we must then wait an extra 40 minutes before director Steve Bendelak locates Mr. Bean’s comic pulse. It happens during a countryside idyll where his needlessly frenetic filming style gives way to a strolling gait. After a first half that’s something of a hit-and-miss affair, tagging along after Mr. Bean on vacation in France, this road pic pulls itself together by taking a breather, along with the great man, in wide open rural spaces. Even the plot starts to build as Bean, befriended by lovely actress Emma de Caunes, finds his way to the Cannes Film Festival where an ageless Willem Dafoe is showing a hilarious bit of navel-gazing tripe in competition. Naturally, Bean disrupts the event (and inadvertently saves the day) before reuniting a lost Russian son with his dad (don’t ask); finally hitting the beach for a blissed-out group sing-along comic catharsis on the pristine sands. As with the previous feature-length BEAN/’97, this posh looking production can’t quite capture the balance of charm, whimsy & cataclysmic mayhem seen in the best of Atkinson’s tv series (a matter of physical scale or running time?), but is plenty enjoyable all the same. Viva la Bean!

DOUBLE-BILL: Assuming you’ve gone thru Atkinson’s time-traveling BLACKADDER historicals, keep your eyes peeled for his latest, a new series of Inspector Maigret mysteries. We certainly are.

DARBAREYE ELLY / ABOUT ELLY (2009)

Made right before his breakthrough on A SEPARATION/’11, writer/director Asghar Farhadi tests out a similar story construction technique with this story about a group of friends (married couples, kids, singles) sharing a beachfront rental over a 3-day holiday. With the exception of newcomer Elly, an attraction young single brought along for an informally arranged meeting with a divorced member of the core group, they all know each other, and each others’ foibles, only too well. But what starts out as light-hearted fun & games, soon takes a dark turn with a near drowning and a mysterious disappearance, buried in the shifting glare of half-truths. Farhadi’s method of storytelling plays out thru character turns or plot twists; secrets revealed within little lies; with social pleasantries pointedly reversing expectations and/or assumptions. Inside every reveal a concealment, with every fresh light a shadow to keep the truth out of reach. But what worked to revelatory effect in A SEPARATION (and nearly so in THE PAST/’13), feels forced here. Not the forced camaraderie, games & hijinks of uncomfortably close vacation revels, but the forced dramatic weight of a story built out of missed signals and artfully gauged incremental revelations. The film insists on each new move as a step toward the tragic, but the gear-grinding & social embarrassment is more like a sexually charged boulevard farce from Georges Feydeau. It’s just that no one got around to letting the cast & crew in on the joke. They missed seeing the razor’s edge difference that makes tragedy out of development and farce out of vamping.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Few saw thru this, but a quick look at either A SEPARATION or THE PAST (see above) makes everything crystal clear.