RONIN (1998)

Seriously overcooked car chase film (with intellectual pretensions and major Jean-Pierre Melville issues) sees director John Frankenheimer working hard to erase any memories of his last (Marlon Brando’s infamous ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU remake), but unable to make much sense of what’s basically a tricked up caper pic.*  A gaggle of international experts (robbers, ex-agents, computer whiz, demolition master), all outside the law, wait & plan in a chilly warehouse for Irish Boss Lady to start the mission: Cash Exchanged for Mystery Package.  (Shh . . . it’s a McGuffin!)  But since no one trusts anyone to be who they say they are or play straight, a nighttime handoff becomes a shootout, the shootout a spectacular car chase.  And damned if it doesn’t happen all over again, now in daylight with loads of collateral damage in a tourist-filled city.  Then, more of the same after the finale begins with a sizable lift out of Frankenheimer’s own classic THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE/’63.  Scripter David Mamet, like his characters hiding under an assumed name (Richard Weisz), must have thought he was turning GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS into a caper pic (actually, GGR kinda is a caper pic, no?), but hopefully found more than a McGuffin when he looked in his paycheck envelope.  (Hackdom has its rewards.)  Robert De Niro and Jean Reno are the sympathetic pair in the group, constantly surprised to find their partners have hidden agendas.  But only main villain Jonathan Pryce actually does anything surprising.  And while the CGI-free car chases are truly spectacular, they go on so long they start to feel disconnected from the film, unable to give off the afterglow of the more dramatically tethered classics in BULLITT/’68 or THE FRENCH CONNECTION/’71.  The latter’s unhappy sequel directed by a certain John Frankenheimer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Sure enough, RONIN a commercial disappointment while MOREAU tanking disastrously but not without interest.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-island-of-dr-moreau-1996.html

ES GESCHAH AM HELLICHTEN TAG / IT HAPPENED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT (1958)

Fascinating, not so much for its grim story on the hunt for a serial killer of little girls than for what it suggests about acceptable limits on murder investigation techniques in post-war Germany. Co-written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (playwright of THE VISIT) and directed by Ladislao Vajda, the first half is a neat, if unexceptional, police procedural showing step-by-step what happens after tramp/peddler Michel Simon trips over a fresh victim while cutting thru the woods.  Phoning the police as soon as he reaches the next town, his drifter status makes him not a concerned citizen but a likely suspect.  Townspeople & the police think its more likely he reported the crime to cover his own actions.  Only top detective Heinz Rühmann thinks otherwise, but as he’s leaving the force tomorrow . . . well, the courts will follow up.  But then events take a tragic turn and he’s more convinced than ever that the peddler didn’t do it.  Now off the force, his only clue a fantastical drawing the young victim made at school.  He thinks it depicts the scene of the crime and the murderer.  But how to decipher her clues?  So far, so good.  But here the film becomes sehr Deutsch, with our heroic detective spending half a year narrowing the crime scene area and finding a likely young girl to ‘bait’ a trap for the real killer.  Naturally, once he spots an 8-yr-old who’s just the type, he lies his way into putting her in harms way without letting the girl's mother in on the mission.  Sure, he's obsessed, but are we being asked to applaud his irresponsibility?  Very weird.  So too Gert Fröbe, who conveniently shows up as needed by the plot to play the sicko childlike suspect.  Copying Peter Lorre in M/’31; or is it just untranslatable Bavarian humor?

DOUBLE-BILL: Not seen here but apparently remade as a slow/mo art film in TWILIGHT/’90.  That might work.

1945 (2017)

A Hungarian village a few months after WWII; the sort of place where interpersonal eruptions ricochet in a town where you could divide six degrees of separation by three.  Today is wedding day for the mayor’s son, nearly everyone’s invited, even the bride’s former lover, a hunky farm manager she seems to prefer to the milquetoast groom.  Then there’s the mayor’s wife, addicted to some narcotic, but self-dosing so she can get thru the ceremony.  That’s assuming the tailor gets the alterations done on time and the brandy holds out thru the reception.  Add on another half-dozen little scenarios, well observed and neatly captured by director Ferenc Török in handsome, rather formal b&w compositions.  An insular social-system not so far removed from Marcel Pagnol.  (Actually, removed exactly as far as Hungary is from Marseilles.)  But now under threat by alarming news: two strangers in town, observant Jews by the look of them, perhaps father & adult son.  Relatives of the Jewish family taken away during the war?  The family whose house, whose land & whose worldly goods have been generously ‘distributed’ to various parties in town?  Goods they’ll now have to give up, possibly give back.  And what of the ‘official’ documents they signed to legally transfer the properties.  Who forged papers?  Who lied?  Who’s in trouble?  Who needs a drink?  Did those Jews have to come back?  And on wedding day!  It's a fine construct, though something a bit more reckless, a bit more dangerously comic (Gogol-esque?) might have better served these self-serving hypocrites.  And there’s a large hole right in the center since we instantly see why the two men are in town, while the locals, perhaps from panic & guilt, unaccountably miss it.  The problem not that we catch on, but that the villagers don’t.  But points for a fine feel on period detail & character, and for a willingness to show unchanged distrust & discomfort eight decades on.

THE LONG WAIT (1954)

Classy Brit Victor Saville ended his career with, of all things, a set of Mickey Spillane tough-guy adaptations, directing two of four he produced.   He must have regretted not directing I, THE JURY/’53 (http://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/05/i-jury-1953.html), stepping up to helm #2.  And thank goodness he did.  An improvement in every way, a strong film noir in all departments right from the setup as amnesiac Anthony Quinn finds out he’s wanted for a murder he has no memory of.  They’d lock him up if he hadn’t accidentally burned off his fingerprints.  Yikes!  Free to roam around town, Quinn investigates the crime: his old bank teller’s job; the four dishy dames clamoring for him (one an old flame disguised thru plastic surgery); the town’s corrupt officials & businesses; sees collateral damage from a bullet meant for him.  Every twist a new piece of clarity to his still puzzled brain.  Saville orders all the confusion so you follow along, and he hired brilliantly getting Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco to sparingly score the film (that awful theme song not his) and cinematographer Franz Planer, exceptional not only in shades of noir, but also delving into geometric stylings for the daringly sadistic climax as well as finding angles & lighting that positively transform Quinn who never looked so good before or after.  Saville went back to only producing for director Robert Aldrich on the much admired KISS ME DEADLY/’55, then returning as producer/director for last in the series MY GUN IS QUICK/’57 (not seen here).  If it’s half as good as this, it’s an easy DOUBLE-BILL.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Lots of bad Public Domain copies around on this one.  And since the crisp grain & texture of Planer’s cinematography is so much of the story, check around.  Studio Canal has a fine restored edition available.

DANCE, GIRL, DANCE (1940)

As the sole female director making mainstream Hollywood fare during the silent-to-sound transition, then more sporadically thru 1943, while openly living in a lesbian relationship (and looking the part in suits, close-cropped hair & a mannish aura), feminist critics & academics have inevitably burdened Dorothy Arzner with cultural & political baggage her small total of films can’t support.  Especially as the bulk of her available films were made during the Early Talkie era, adding obstacles in pace & technique for modern audiences on both progressive & retrograde elements in her work.  It makes this penultimate film (Arzner picking up from dropped director Roy Del Ruth after two weeks) a good starting point.*  And it doesn’t hurt that it’s also her most sheerly entertaining, a more than slightly daffy love triangle (make that love pentagon) among the modern ballet set with serious student Maureen O’Hara and knockout Lucille Ball, a more pop oriented type, rivals hunting up gigs & guys.  Ergo nearly divorced playboy Louis Hayward, passed back & forth while ex-wife Virginia Fields waits in the wings.  Plus, dance impresario Ralph Bellamy as backup for O’Hara.  The plotting is frankly bonkers, but the playing & audacity, especially by the fabulous Ms. Ball, is sublime.  Three more women come into play (dance roommate Mary Carlisle, lost in the shuffle; secretary Katherine Alexander, always a matchmaker never a bride; and dance mistress Maria Ouspenskaya as martyr) before everything gets sorted out in Night Court where wise male judge Walter Abel untangles Lucy from Maureen after their on-stage cat-fight (don’t ask).  All this plus a bit of modern ballet and two bravura strip routines for Ball with a humiliated O’Hara en pointe in-between.  Off the charts entertaining; off the map insane.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Or perhaps start with Arzner’s F. Scott Fitzgerald-like MERRILY WE GO TO HELL/’32.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/01/merrily-we-go-to-hell-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: WARNING: BlackFace couple in the big ballet number.

THE TOBACCONIST / DER TRAFIKANT (2018)

Though not without unforced errors (in the lighter first half, co-writer/director Nikolaus Leytner doesn’t trust us enough not to turn obvious; at the end he trusts too much and can be cryptic), this period piece (late-‘30s Austria as the Nazi Anschluss stiffens from rumor to reality) balances charm & tragedy in echt Viennese style.  Handsome country lad Simon Morzé, new to town (new to everything), comes to apprentice tobacconist/philosopher/WWI vet Johannes Krisch; gruff, quizzical, a bit of a bore/a bit of a cliché, but a good man to work for.  And what luck for an over-imaginative adolescent struggling with love, death & hormonal urges that Sigmund Freud (Bruno Ganz), gruff, quizzical, a bit of a bore/a bit of a cliché, but a good man to talk to, is a regular customer you can tell your daydreams & nightmares to.  Leytner using the store’s Havana cigars to get this unlikely friendship going in a natural manner; and in general laying on just the right amount of period detail to set the scene but not get in the way as Freud’s practice drops off due to rising anti-Semitism while the boy’s first love with a cabaret girl from Bohemia waxes, wanes & hits the political wall of popular fascism gone quotidian.  Leytner showing particular facility in handling (and undercutting) the maturing boy’s ultra-realistic daydreams and dramatically-charged/color-constricted nightmares.  The latter with something of the late-‘German’ romantic style of Swiss artist Arnold (‘Isle of the Dead’) Böcklin.  In spite of some lapses, the film unexpectedly fine.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  Bruno Ganz and Alec Guinness may not have a lot in common as actors (Ganz as solid as Guinness is chameleon-slippery), yet they're the only men to have played both Freud and Adolf Hitler in lead roles.  (Guinness plays Freud against modern psychiatrist Dudley Moore in LOVESICK/’83.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/hitler-last-ten-days-1973.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/downfall-2005.html

CRATER (2023)

Theatrical or Streaming?  Not a hard call for movie execs on this Disney Dystopia teenage space adventure.  (A mid-50s budget may sound skimpy for CGI-infected Sci-Fi, but with no-name leads, not so cheap.)  Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez/writer John Griffin, effectively in feature debuts, imagine Earth, a few centuries on, as pretty much toast, while an active Lunar Colony mines fuel for trips to the New World of Planet Omega.  Only a select few qualify, but kids of miners who died on the job win the coveted ‘E-ticket.’   That’s the setup for five teen pals who plan a last wild wknd* before their orphaned pal begins the 75-yr suspended animation trip they’ll never take.  So, naturally with a meteor shower forecast, they steal a Moon Rover to head out for lunar fun & games: low-gravity baseball with rocks  (we laugh at air leaks!); gas-boosted bungee cord blastoffs (boing; you’re in outer space); oxygen tank wasting gags; trashing the interior of the ‘model home’ that saved you with supplies; bury an ash capsule of Dad’s remains next to the ash capsule of Mom (heck, all caring fathers send their teenage sons on sentimental suicide missions, right?); et al.  A MasterClass on Teenage Irresponsibility.  Maybe if the kids weren’t meant to remind us of better past teen actors (the girl/Emma Watson; the pretty boy/Leo DiCaprio; the scaredy-cat Asian/Ke Huy Quan; the two Black teens more original as twenty/thirty years ago they likely wouldn’t have been cast . . . Progress!).  Unimaginative visually as it is in character, the film’s a tear-begging cheat.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *A good bet THE GOONIES/’85 was an early fave of Alvarez & Griffin.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-goonies-1985.html

THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE / TOIVON TUOLLA PUOLEN (2017)

Six years after the particularly well received LE HAVRE/’11, Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki returned to features with another droll, yet serious (seriously droll?) and timely immigrant-plight drama, but crucially moving location from France to his homeland.  It’s another parallel track fable, two men who cross paths going thru life-changing experiences.  Locally: Middle-aged Finnish businessman bets all his assets to quit ‘the rag trade’ (and an alcoholic wife) to buy a restaurant, a remarkably successful establishment considering its drab look & even drabber Finnish cuisine.  (It just survives a brief Japanese experiment featuring delicacies like pickled herring sushi.)  And from Syria: Youngish refugee, illegally entering the country via coal chute (don’t ask) to navigate bureaucratic mazes and lose his case for asylum (he’s already lost a sister on the way), but escaping to be found by our depressed, but kindly disposed restauranteur.  With signature visual precision & economy, Kaurismäki sprinkles his still, comic, deadpan style like fairy dust o’er all, with little camera movement to fuss up his exquisitely ‘right’ compositions and apt splotches of vivid color.  How he parses between threatening moments of despair or physical violence with sheer grace & wry humor a Finnish mystery as inscrutable as an ‘impossible’ stunt from the Buster Keaton two-reel comic shorts he’s perhaps not so distantly related to.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, LE HAVRE.  OR:  His latest, not seen here, but due in Cannes any moment, FALLEN LEAVES  /  KUOLLEET LEHDET/’23.

BUDAPEST NOIR (2017)

The title is irresistible.  The film not so much.  Vet Hungarian editor Éva Gárdos was near 70 when she jumped to feature directing on this old-school murder mystery, swapping out police or private detectives for a hard-nosed newspaper reporter, joined at the hip by his on-and-off photog gal pal just back from Nazi Germany.  So when a prostitute’s suicide starts looking more like defenestration, and a chain of contacts leads to thugs, madames, a pulchritude portraitist, prominent civil servants & wealthy private citizens, somebody’s got to ask the tough questions . . . and risk getting clobbered.  Hard to miss capturing just the right atmosphere for this type of thing in the backstreets, bridges & architectural gems of Budapest, and the plot twists from the late András Szekér’s novel still have a flavorsome kick to them and even add up logically.  (No small thing in this genre.)  If only the cast didn’t feel so up-to-date; the style so generic; the clothes so off-the-rack.  Leading lady Réka Tenki has real period style in her sweetly asymmetrical face, but everyone else is strictly LAW AND ORDER: BUDAPEST, especially leading man Krisztián Kolovratnik, whose heavy stubble changes in every scene.  Little things like that really matter in such an overworked genre; like Atti Pacsay’s award-winning cool jazz background score that sounds a decade off, more ‘40's/‘50s than ‘30s.  But ignore production gaffes to be rewarded with a third act that’s atypically well-prepared and tidy for the form.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: To see how to do these things for a modern audience, try the Philip Kerr series of Nazi-era Berlin detective novels featuring police detective Bernie Gunther.  The first three now out together as BERLIN NOIR (hmm, catchy title!) and the later books only get better.  Why they’ve not been picked up for film beyond me.