HEAVY METAL (1981)

Yes, the rock music genre is well represented on the soundtrack (along with an Elmer Bernstein score), but this is mainly a series of dystopian sketches from the eponymous magazine, done in ‘80s hallucinatory animation style.  And quite effective, too, though the eight stories tend to merge into one big search for a green orb of power by fighting alpha-males & flying alpha monsters along with a single bare, busty warrior princess type for almost every chapter.  (Just right for the presumed target audience of horny nerds.)  A Canadian production, Ivan Reitman was one of the producers, it’s loaded with SCTV vocal talent, but is largely held together not by narrative drive (that’s all over the place), but by all the violent action, its Space Opera æsthetic, Mayan architectural style, and lesbian leather-bar couture.  Some of the animation looks distressingly rotoscoped, but most of the drawing & effects have a stylish ‘80s period feel, pleasantly nostalgic.  The whole project, in spite of each segment having its own crew, held together by supervising director Gerald Potterton* along with R-rated erotism & ultra-violence.  (How many of the stories feature decapitation?)  Unlike the artsy FANTASTIC PLANET/’73 or some of Ralph Bakshi’s would-be edgy animated features, this one still cool, still fun.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Potterton worked on YELLOW SUBMARINE/’68, but is probably best known not for animation, but for the cross-Canada-by-mini-train comic travelogue, THE RAILRODDER/’65, a miraculous little short with Buster Keaton who more-or-less co-directed.  (As can be seen in the equally essential documentary on its filming: BUSTER RIDES AGAIN/’65.)

I MET MY LOVE AGAIN (1938)

A real curiosity this.  Stage director Joshua Logan had yet to his make mark on B’way when he was called to Hollywood as dialogue director for David Selznick (GARDEN OF ALLAH/’36) and Walter Wanger (HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT/’37).  Hating the experience, he was unexpectedly called back to co-direct (with Arthur Ripley*) Wanger’s wife, Joan Bennett, in this F. Scott Fitzgerald wannabe story of youthful futility, mistimed gestures of love, drift,  boozing & a fatal ‘mock’ duel in Paris; and finally love renewed.  Joan Bennett is the blonde girl in the prologue who runs off on a romantic whim then returns to science professor Henry Fonda as a brunette, now a chastened young widow with bratty child.  Can they make a go of it after ten missing years, especially with that clingy student making a big play for the professor.  It all comes down to a snowy, suicide ride of a climax almost as fatalistic & nutty as Wanger’s previous film, HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT.  That film had director Frank Borzage bringing his signature romantic fatalism; this one has Logan & Ripley.  A vacuum producer Wanger noted, calling in George Cukor (way too late) as a third director.  Still, fun watching Bennett ignore continuity from one scene to another as she tests various shades of brown hair.  (She’d go dark brunette from here on.)  And for some reason there’s an absolute whopper glam shot (it might be a George Hurrell portrait) of college student Tim Holt standing up to challenge Fonda in his science class.  Why Mohr went to such trouble is a mystery.*  But then, not much makes sense in this one.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Logan returned to Hollywood after twenty years, now a big shot B’way success.  He never did get the hang of moviemaking.  While Ripley, like Logan with only a handful of features made something of a cult item in THE CHASE/’46 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-chase-1946.html), from a Cornell Woolrich story.  Oddly, with Tim Holt’s dad, Jack Holt in a major supporting role.  OR: As mentioned, HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/02/hisory-is-made-at-night-1937.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Did Orson Welles remember this shot when he cast Holt in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS?

THE GREAT LOCOMOTIVE CHASE (1956)

Better than decent Disney live-action historical works off the same Civil War incident Buster Keaton used for THE GENERAL/’26; here played straight and largely from a Northern P.O.V.*  Fess Parker, at the height of his Davy Crockett coonskin popularity, brings his cut-rate Gregory Peck manners along as he leads a raiding party of Northerners-in-mufti across the border to Marietta, GA with a plan to steal Jeffrey Hunter’s ammo-loaded train (that’s ‘The General’) and head back North.  That puts Jeffrey Hunter in the Buster Keaton spot.  Sounds a little weird even without slapstick trimmings.  Episodic tv director Francis D. Lyon works cleanly, but is held back by a lack of style (or rather 1950s Disney house-style), unvaried pacing and limited action chops.  And his ‘just the facts, Ma’am’ approach reduces characters to lowest-common-denominator motivation, dumbed-down for textbook history comprehension.  But the story remains compelling enough to keep us involved even with Junior High audio-visual department æsthetics that keep the lid on during a prison breakout sequence that ought to be the film’s climax.  And everything suffers whenever Disney house composer Paul J. Smith pours on those generic background music cues.  Look fast for a nice touch from engineer Slim Pickens, cookin’ off strips of bacon on the furnace door.  More detail & observations like that could have made this something special.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Like a Mathew Brady battlefield photo come to life (but with laughs!), good editions of THE GENERAL can be found on Lobster Films; KINO and EUREKA.  CHASE probably more fun to watch if you see the Keaton film first.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *It’s based on a book by conspirator William Pittenger whose estate moved to stop production on THE GENERAL back in ‘26.  But with three separate survivor memoirs as well as Public Domain historic records the suit never had a chance.  More info in James Curtis’s stunning new bio: BUSTER KEATON: A Filmmaker’s Life which also clears up a lot of misinformation on THE GENERAL, including it’s ultimate box-office performance.

LOS DÍAS DE LA BALLENA / DAYS OF THE WHALE (2019)

Film-fest oriented pic from Medellin, Colombia sees debuting writer/director Catalina Arroyave Restrepo offering student-level execution to a workable, if somewhat hackneyed dramatic situation: Twenty-something graffiti artist couple trying to move past the crime elements & drug scene of their student days even as past friends continue in ‘the trade.’  About halfway thru, the character drama finds a plot of sorts when one of their recently primed ‘wall canvases,’ located near a Youth Center they frequent, is vandalized with a threatening slogan aimed at them: ‘Snitches Get Stitches.’   Debating whether or not to go on with what is suddenly a dangerous art statement, the possibility of a beating, a murder and a magnificent painting of a whale tests their will.  You can see how this is meant to work, and there’s a refreshing new angle in seeing it play out in a middle-class milieu (not a favela in sight), but Restrepo gets little but standard responses out of her young cast, and her jerky handheld style grows progressively alienating.  Disappointing.

PROMISE AT DAWN / LA PROMESSE DE L’AUBE (2017)

Suffocating, exhausting, overbearing, insufferable, the kind of micromanaged Jewish ‘Smotherlove’ to drive a son (or daughter) to the psychiatrist’s couch.  Or, as in the case of French writer Romain Gary, to the typewriter (two Goncourt Prizes) and flyboy heroics in WWII.  Gary’s true tall tale/auto-bio was filmed before, Jules Dassin with an impossibly miscast Melina Mercouri in 1970, but Charlotte Gainsbourg’s drudge-with-a-dream Mother Courage is more within the margin of terror, unafraid to make this single Mom remarkable and horrific.  As the much put-upon son attempting to live up to maman’s absurd dreams of la gloire (the two out of Russia thru Poland), Pierre Niney, with his sleek Art Deco Jewish aspect, makes this literary fall-guy an almost believable human being.*  Co-writer/director Eric Barbier relies too heavily on consistent arrhythmic editing and staccato attack, like a case of the hiccups you can’t get rid of, but the story gains interest (and laughs) as one whopper follows another in Gary’s progress thru love, war, equal-opportunity anti-Semitism & guilty son syndrome.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   Awarded for the unfortunate YVES SAINT LAURENT/’14, Niney is just as good in FRANTZ/’17, a far better work.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/02/yves-saint-laurent-2014.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/frantz-2016.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *If anyone in French film is contemplating a George Gershwin bio-pic, Niney’s your man.

TONI (1935)

Long a missing piece of the Jean Renoir puzzle (between his MADAME BOVARY/’34 misfire and the great late-‘30s run starting with THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE/’36), TONI wasn’t properly restored till 2019.  (Criterion release 2020.)  But well worth the wait as this unique work sees Renoir forego Paris for Southern Province and 100% on-location working-class drama of foreign quarry workers and the local women they find readily available in a male depleted post-WWI France.  Purportedly a true crime story, one of those doomed love quadrangles with loyal Marie who has rooms to rent; flirtatious Josefa who likes having a spare man on the side; immigrant Italian laborer Toni moving from one to the other; and French foreman Max Dalban, villain in the piece, all four helpless in the face of malleable affection & unreturned longing.  Registered in plain, naturistic style by Renoir (nephew Pierre in his first major cinematography assignment), with wonderful supporting turns from carefree lover Andrex and sympathetic pal Michel Kovachevitch.  The film, oft cited as proto-Neo-Realism or prescient Nouveau Vague in style, does have some elements that lean that way.  But with it’s neatly rhymed narrative momentum, largely professional actors in leading roles, and sense of high dramatic determinism among the working-class, it’s just as close (if not closer) to operatic verismo (think CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA or LOUISE) than it is to Rossellini or De Sica.  And, if not without a few awkward beats (after its unsuccessful first-run the film was edited down by about three reels), it’s still memorable stuff, still echt Renoir.

DOUBLE-BILL: Charles Blavette (Toni) again worked with Renoir in 1959's PICNIC ON THE GRASS.  Though the Renoir film that best matches with TONI is his four-reel masterpiece A DAY IN THE COUNTRY/’46.

I, THE JURY (1953)

Bestsellers back in the day, surely the old Mickey Spillane potboilers with detective Mike Hammer couldn’t have been this bad.  On page delivering an edgy ‘50s thrill, presumably for their frank sex & violence, this initial Spillane film is pure amateurville.  (Make that puerile amateurville; so bad, you wonder if they’re ‘kidding on the square' or merely incompetent.)  Laughably written & ineptly directed by episodic tv man Harry Essex, this independent production wastes such notable talent as producer Victor Saville, composer Franz Waxman & lenser John Alton on a loopy tale of murder & revenge as Mike looks to uncover the killer of his one-armed pal.  Shot in 3D, but released ‘flat’ which perhaps explains the OTT acting from vets like Hammer’s boss Preston Foster as well as debuting lead Biff Eliot, maxi-intense, hopelessly over-parted.  Perhaps a film festival 3D presentation would perk things all the way up to campy fun.  Nah.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Two reasons to watch: The incredible interior where Hammer has his office, the Bradbury Building (those elevators!).  The building still stands, still seen on screen, now with close to 100 appearances.  Reason #2 below . . . 

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: The second reason to watch is to better appreciate just how well THE BAND WAGON/”53 caught Spillane’s self-parodistic voice in the Vincente Minnelli/Michael Kidd ‘Girl Hunt’ Ballet with Fred Astaire & Cyd Charisse.  The great musical released exactly one week before JURY came out.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-band-wagon-1953.html

THE WINDERMERE CHILDREN (2020)

Lots of smart creative decisions aren’t quite enough to take this post-Holocaust docu-drama beyond acceptable/well-intentioned.  Fact-based, if highly compressed (so much left on the table), it follows 300 young Concentration Camp survivors as they struggle thru a program designed to help them jumpstart (rather than reclaim) lives thru a recovery program in rural England.  Lots of early missteps, beginning with the camp itself which for all intents & purposes comes across to the victims as a benevolent version of the hell holes they’ve come from.  But once the bumps get sorted out (and the unlimited bread-basket explained), other problems pop up as the kids, especially the older boys start to ‘act out’ and rebel in typical teenage fashion.  Bad behavior, but psychologically healthy; a sign of normalcy, if only the filmmakers weren’t afraid of losing sympathy by making these sorts of scenes as uncomfortable as they need to be.  On the other hand, having the younger children, as well as the older girls, largely drop out of the picture to focus on the young men over the four months of rehabilitation, may lose complexity, but gains in restraining soft-hearted (or is it soft-headed?) sentimentality.  (No mournful cellos playing like it's Yom Kippur service on the soundtrack.)  And it does build to an honest emotional coda when some of the actual boys, now old man, are juxtaposed with their youthful selves.  Maybe this tv movie just needed more running time (a lot more) to do the story justice.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Displaced WWII children in THE SEARCH/’48 (real ones, BTW) were the focus of professional breakouts for director Fred Zinnemann and actor Montgomery Clift.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-search-1948.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Director Michael Samuels too often leaves us in the dark . . . literally.  You get the idea, reflecting their dark recent past, but sometimes you simply can’t see what’s going on.

CLUB HAVANNA (1945)

You expect Grade-Z movie whiz Edgar G. Ulmer to pull off shabby, minor-key nihilistic pulp like DETOUR, his classic film noir released just before this.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/09/detour-1945.html)  What you don’t expect on the tiny PRC Poverty Row budgets he worked under is a splashy, nightclub musical noir with multiple storylines interwoven behind six musical acts.  All in just over an hour? That’s the task set in this enterprising genre mash-up covering a cash strapped investor wooing a wealthy old crone; a killer out on bail and a witness/performer who could put him back behind bars (and there’s a hired hitman hanging around to finish the job); a fresh divorcée popping a handful of sleeping pills when the man she’s long loved pulls back; powder room tête-à-têtes between crises; and more!  It’s GRAND HOTEL in a Nightclub, once removed.*  Dopey stuff, but also a fun watch.  Those Latin-rhythmed numbers are darn catchy.  (One dance duo with castanets a bit better than that.)  And Ulmer, who always shined playing around with music, maintains a beat in the vignettes with only a few inadequate actors stinking up the joint.  Though what Margaret Lindsey, hardly used to Poverty Row ways after years at Warners, Columbia & Universal, thought of the experience would be nice to know.  Some of Ulmer’s group staging when the club is full really defies the possibilities of his budget.  The film just the thing if you were a grindhouse operator looking for a short-ish feature to run as a ‘chaser’ on a triple-bill.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The ‘once removed’ cousin between GRAND HOTEL and this would be Warners’ WONDER BAR/’33, an earlier GRAND HOTEL in a Nightclub pic with Kay Francis, Ricardo Cortez, Al Jolson in his best perf, and a humdinger murder to solve.  It would be better known if it didn’t feature the most stupendously offensive, jaw-dropping BlackFace ‘numbo’ ever filmed.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/01/wonder-bar-1933.html