THE STOLEN RANCH (1926)

Director-in-chrysalis William Wyler, captured here in his early twenties plugging away at Universal Pictures, alternating two-reel Western shorts with the occasional five-reel Western feature, often with regular leading man Fred Humes.  Most of these films long gone (and not much to be missed if contemporary reviews can be believed), so we’re lucky this surviving five-reeler is such a charmer.  (Possibly thanks to a lot of on set rewriting; possibly by Wyler.)  It follows a pair of WWI buds (note freshly shot war footage), the two very bromantic after swapping life saves in the war which left one severely shell-shocked.  Now out West back home, with an inherited ranch to run, our shell-shocked vet lucky his pal (Humes) plans to hang around to keep him from freaking out whenever a shot rings out.  Especially since a couple of con men have counterfeited a fake will and plan to sell the farm from its shell-shocked rightful owner.  The buyer’s a neighboring rancher with a pretty daughter who soon develops an eye for the wounded vet while his fellow vet, his protector, hired on the ranch where the forgers are plotting, hits it off with the pretty gal he shares K.P. duty with.  (Humes is staying undercover to expose the scam and no one knows he’s the wounded vet’s BFF nor that he’s an expert horseman.)  Boilerplate stuff, but what a swell job Wyler makes of it.  Pacing, horsey showmanship, handsome locations, daring use of blackout action, great shot composition on the romantic roundelay mix-ups (how’d Wyler find the time to get these things so precise on a 6-day shoot?), neat comic relief (check out the potato juggling on K.P.), with the forgotten Fred Humes putting out darn pleasant aw-shucks two-fisted Western appeal.   Modest fare, but doing just what it came to do.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Only the second credit for cinematographer Alan Jones which means Wyler likely took charge photographically.  It helps explains why Wyler’s partnership with lensing icon Gregg Toland only warmed up once someone told Wyler not to tell Toland what lens, what lights and what angles to use on every set up.  ALSO: Note Wyler’s natural use of compound silent storytelling as when Humes starts getting on with his romance while on kitchen duty; turning potato peeling into a bit of comic relief; listening thru the door on the plot to steal the ranch from his shell-shocked pal; and playing dumb when he’s nearly caught.  Four or five narrative balls in the air all at once without breaking a sweat.  Maybe all newbie directors should make five-reel silent Westerns instead of going to film school.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  See Wyler triumphantly emerge from his apprenticeship on his last silent, THE SHAKEDOWN/’29.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-shakedown-1929.html

LA NANA / THE MAID (2009)

Breakout film (deservedly so) for Chilean writer/director Sebastián Silva dives straight into a spiral of emotional and mental decline for Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), the overwhelmed housemaid to a rich/handsome family of seven.  Dutifully celebrating her forty-first birthday & twenty years of service, it soon becomes impossible to ignore escalating friction on the job, especially with the two older girls.  Truth is, Raquel has no life outside her ‘work family,’ and is only just hanging on, ineffectively self-medicating against headaches & dizziness.  The head of the house looks the other way (or sneaks off for a round of golf) while the wife tries to make things work with offers of help, including assistants (one young & docile/one an old tartar), each viewed by Raquel as threats she childishly needs to vanquish.  But just when you expect the film to devolve into some sort of violence or tragedy, Silva believably shifts gears in the most thoughtful way imaginable after physical collapse brings in a third-time’s-the-charm assistant in the form of a wonderfully centered woman from the countryside (Mariana Loyola) who gives Raquel something she’s never experienced before: friendship.  The third act here is almost breathtakingly original, even wise; so too the emotionally satisfying epilogue.  Serious and very entertaining, a rare talent is born.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The lack of villains here as noticeable as in those very early Jonathan Demme films, before he began keeping score.  It didn’t last long for Demme (two films!); here’s hoping Silva continues to honor Jean Renoir’s dictum that everyone has their reasons.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Among many gifts, Silva shows a rare knack in the use of non-exploitative casual nudity.  Usually for narrative or character building, but also for generating big honest laughs.  It’s stopping me from sticking a Family Friendly label on this; don’t let it stop you.

INCIDENT IN AN ALLEY (1962)

A real nothingburger.  The penultimate film of the prolifically untalented Edward L. Cahn, going out not with a bang, but with a whimper.  (Whom were these tiny atrocities made for?  Even Roger Corman had more time & money at his disposal; more attitude in spite of his own shallow skill set.  And Corman’s films always had a place as Drive-In ‘second features.’ Did Cahn get the triple-feature slot at inner-city flop house bijoux?)  This one, based on a short story by Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, starts with low-wattage WEST SIDE STORY vibes as a gang of teen toughs rob a music store and trigger the alarm.  A cleaning lady stumbles in, gets whacked and the hoods run off in all directions.  That ends the fun part of the film as we switch gears from delinquent teens to ADAM-12 patrol cops.  (ADAM-12 looks good in comparison.)  In spite of yelling STOP, one teen is shot in the back and dies.  Why he’s only 14 says the ashen cop.  And while the courts may let him off, his conscience won’t.  All of this drab, drab, drab; with some truly horrible acting that could give anyone the giggles, before a rushed third act squares things up and justifies the cop’s actions.  Of the cast, only Willis Bouchey as the hearty Police Captain is someone you’ll recognize.  The lead cop went nowhere fast (so too the actress playing his wife) while his patrol partner died young a few years later from a heart attack.  A sharper script would have stayed focused on those streetwise kids*, all dreaming of roles they never got and soon grew out of.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Teen toughs were primed for lampoon as far back as Jerry Lewis in THE DELICATE DELINQUENT/’57, his first without Dean Martin.  Awful as it is, like so many Lewis pics, there’s one standout scene, here fortunately it’s the opening so there’s no waiting!  And, wouldn’t you know, the sequence might well have been titled INCIDENT IN AN ALLEY . . . With A Garbage Can.

WRONG IS RIGHT (1982)

If you thought slapstick satire of modern world politics (focus MidEast Terrorism) climaxing with the discovery of timed nuclear bombs attached to a flagpole atop NYC’s World Trade Center would have attracted notice as unnerving forecast of the real 9/11 two decades later, think again.  The film, and frankly writer/director Richard Brooks, long gone from being part of the conversation.  Rightfully so in spite of the tempting cast: Headline tv reporter Sean Connery; President George Grizzard; interpreter Katharine Ross, political rival Leslie Nielsen; hardline general Robert Conrad; C.I.A. man John Saxon; Arab interloper Henry Silva; White House Aides G.D. Spradlin & Dean Stockwell; Veep Rosalind Cash; Illegal arms seller Hardy Krüger and so on.  The gist of the thing is that writer Brooks thinks he’s tearing apart modern news & newsroom hypocrisy like Paddy Chayefsky in NETWORK/’76, while director Brooks thinks he’s on to the physical comedy style of Blake Edwards in, say, S.O.B./’81.*  Alas, Brooks hasn’t a comic synapse in his noggin, more grumpy Granddad kidding-on-the-square about the state of the world.  Purposefully politically incorrect, circa 1982 (which is saying something!), but with neither aptitude nor insight on the subject and certainly none of the timing to land his extremely sour jokes.  Then giving Connery a cri de coeur speech on how the news is just an excuse to sell products & garner ratings.  A diatribe lifted straight out of Tom Stoppard’s NIGHT AND DAY on B’way with Maggie Smith in 1979.  Nothing else Brooks does in here quite as shameless.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *While Blake Edwards’ target was The Movies rather than The World, you can see what Brooks must have been aiming for watching Edwards take on Hollywood in S.O.B.  Not a bad idea in theory.  Edwards’ later films got stuck in a personal loop of Mid-Life crises.  Maybe a dose of overactive Chayefsky venom would have been just the ticket to jolt him out of his psychological funk.  And a dose of slapstick good for Chayefsky, too.  (See THE HOSPITAL/’71)    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/02/sob-1981.html 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: As our posters show, Columbia Pictures (above) hadn’t a clue on how to sell this thing.  While Euro-distributors (on your left) thought: Sean Connery?  Pretend it’s James Bond.

NON-STOP (2014)

Hard to imagine a film actor acquiring action movie chops about the time his first AARP card comes in the mail.  If you weren’t working those action genre muscles from your physical prime, it’s probably past ‘sell date’ to start pummeling bad guys or single-handedly taking out drug cartels and having an audience buy it.  But then there’s Liam Neeson, growing only more believable as a physical presence with each staggered step and exhausted punch.  TAKEN/’08 the one that got this late career surge going; after that, all diminished returns.  Right?  Well, actually no.  Diminished returns for official TAKEN sequels & unofficial reboots, but others working territory a bit to the side can look as good or even better than the progenitor.  Ergo, NON-STOP.  A thriller, half suspense/half whodunit (best on the whodunit side), finds Neeson working undercover as an Air Marshall who’s seen better days: Family lost/Alcohol found.  Here, he’s fighting an unknown nutcase, one of 150 passengers & crew on an international flight he’s working, threatening to kill someone every twenty minutes if he doesn’t get 150 mill.  Yikes!  Cleverly worked up by director Jaume Collet-Serra* & scripters John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach & Ryan Engle, the plotting and murders are complicated enough to earn some bad laughs as it hurtles along, and there’s too much rubbery CGI effects at the explosive ending, but a remarkably strong cast for the genre and Neeson’s craggy authority when in personal distress keep it together.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Neeson and Collet-Serra followed next year with RUN ALL NIGHT/’15.  The first of these Neeson action films to fail commercially; naturally it’s the best of the lot.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/10/run-all-night-2015.html

FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS / aka DER SCHWEIGENDE STERN / THE SILENT STAR (1960)

Don’t let the Kiddie Matinee title for the butchered Stateside cut mislead you, the original 93" Communist Bloc release, an East German/Polish co-production by award-winning director Kurt Maetzig from a Stanislaw Lem novel, is pretty sober-sided Sci-Fi for the period.  And why not?  The first film to try something approaching realism in space was also from Germany, Fritz Lang’s technically groundbreaking UFA silent FRAU IM MOND/’29.  (Technically, this film not too far from M-G-M’s FORBIDDEN PLANET/’55.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/05/forbidden-planet-1956.html)  And, as opposed to NASA’s all male/all-white astronaut bourgeoisie, behind the Iron Curtain crews are international.  (Or is it ‘Interntionale?’)  Multi-cultural/multi-ethnic cosmonauts with a German pilot leading one African Black*, one Chinese, a Pole, a white American physicist, even a female from Japan in spite of past entanglement with the Russian co-pilot.  OBJECT: Venus.  VEHICLE: Redirected Mars Rocket, now Venus bound.  MISSION: Find the cause of a crash landing on Earth by a ‘manned’ probe from Venus.  The choicest parts in here come early on (same true for Fritz Lang’s moon journey); once we land on Venus, the allegory of possible nuclear destruction on Earth takes over the narrative.  But the spacey ‘60s look in design and neat-o model effects hold loads of interest.  Plus: good restoration with subtitles and high resolution FREE on youtube.  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xDtliUL2bo)  Be sure to check out the techie uniforms, they might be cheerleaders at Space U: Team ‘A’; Team ‘M’ and Team ‘T.’   Plus, great metal robotic insects still ‘alive’ on Venus and even a C3PO precursor named Omega.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, FRAU IM MOND; or THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL/’51 for the likely inspiration to this allegory.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/frau-im-mond-woman-in-moon-1929.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Any cinematographer will tell you, surface textures & colors reflect light differently.  So while it’s great, and rather unusual in 1960, to see a Black cosmonaut on screen, ensemble shots haven’t been lit to properly handle light & dark complexions within a single frame.  Compositions where he’s included with other shipmates leave this African crew member all but depersonalized by prioritizing lighter skin tones in some of the subtlest racism ever seen on film.

MAN IN THE MIDDLE / THE WINSTON AFFAIR (1964)

Right before slam dunking his first James Bond assignment (GOLDFINGER/’64), director Guy Hamilton made this fairly standard, but good, WWII courtroom drama.  Based on a Howard Fast novel (hence its Stateside alternate title), it holds up better than many more famous WWII Court Martial pics.  Opening with a literal bang, American officer Keenan Wynn shoots his British equivalent Lieut. at their Indian base camp.  With the war effort building toward a close, and international armies converging in immense staging areas, the top brass in the area want to see a quick & tidy death sentence to keep peace between Allied powers.  Enter Robert Mitchum, recovering war hero/wounded Lt. Col./occasional Army lawyer; just the man to run a lost-cause honest defense, per superior officer Barry Sullivan.  If only Mitchum didn’t take his position quite so honestly.  Helped by a pair of brash Army legal eagles out of Manhattan; a pretty nurse with inside info whom Mitchum quickly falls for (France Nuyen); and reluctant Army shrink Sam Wanamaker, the case may well save a life, but slow up the war effort.  From Mitchum on down, everyone’s tip-top here, with the real locations adding verisimilitude under Wilkie Cooper’s lensing.  Just bear in mind this is Howard Fast territory, so hard decisions made a little too easy/a little too clear cut: Wynn racist, pathological, paranoid; Trevor Howard’s surprise witness published, university-tenured, world-renowned psychiatrist familiar with the case.  But well handled and (keeping CAPE FEAR/’62 in mind*) it's fun to watch Mitchum take on the Gregory Peck role for a change.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The original CAPE FEAR/’62  -  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/cape-fear-1962.html)

THE NIGHT WALKER (1964)

Amicable a decade after divorcing, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor no doubt saw the writing on wall when Horror Schlockmeister William Castle stunt casted them in one of his underfunded fright fests.  Stanwyck, still in fine shape at 57, took the hint and switched to tv after this, Taylor, looking much older than his 53 years, had already sunk to tv, Disney & Embassy films, soldiered on even with the touch of death on his once handsome face.  No horror pic, though Castle works hard pretending so (as does PSYCHO scripter Robert Bloch), but a ‘gaslighting’ setup with Stanwyck living & screaming thru a series of nightmares induced by a trio of false friends out to grab everything she inherited after her creepy husband died in a house fire.  Castle tosses in plenty of mumbo-jumbo from beginning to end: dream sequences, pseudo-scientific explanations, extended half-reel prologue, schlock cuts and things that go bump in the night.  It’s quite a comedown for these vet stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, since unlike some of their peers who knew how to tear into these things with relish; as actors, Stanwyck too honest/Taylor too limited, neither with a camp bone in their body.  (Stanwyck could play this stuff straight, see SORRY, WRONG NUMBER/’48 while Taylor unable to play the surprise baddie, see CONSPIRATOR/’49.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/conspirator-1949.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention to the music by Vic Mizzy on a harpsichord kick with tv’s THE ADDAMS FAMILY also out this year.  Attention to Stanwyck who, for the only time in her career, is caught anticipating a reaction.  (Or did Castle mistime the edit?)  And finally to all the looped dialogue on such a simple shoot with tv production values.  Something wrong with the sound equipment?  (And be sure to click on our poster to expand it so you can read all the exciting bullet points!)

CHOP SHOP (2007)

With his documentary background, writer/director Ramin Bahrani gets all the details right on this ground up look at life on the streets for a toughened tween, hustling out a living in Willets Point, Queens, a sort of open air warren of competing car repair & body workshops.  (The neighborhood long eyed for a tear-down/redevelopment plan currently projected to start . . . soon?)  The lead kid in the story, non-pro Alejandro Polanco, may look like an Oliver Twist type, but he’s 100% Artful Dodger, a barker for his garage to motorists looking for the best deal on car parts or repair, living illegally in a shack inside the garage where he works; learning the tools of the trade, learning the biz, and picking up whatever temp gigs he can, tagging along with immigrants on the hunt for day-work, selling counterfeit DVDs, grabbing the occasional purse at nearby Mets Stadium or at the U.S. Tennis Open.  But his real goal is to open a food catering truck with his older sister.  Living with him in his little hut, she works at another food truck and also hustles blow jobs on the side.  Superbly observed and paced by Bahrani, immediately a real filmmaker, check out his careful control of palette and mood as the story darkens and opportunities close down around the siblings.  What he can’t do is freshen up tropes in a story  so familiar they feel telegraphed even when they’re not.  (He does triumphantly setup a stash of cash to be stolen only to leave it alone.)  A tough life even for a kid who’s easily hurt, but quickly assuaged.  And, as he’s never gone to school and is functionally illiterate, getting into trouble since he can’t read the fine print details that come with his dream of independence.  Great use of the limits of trust and casual friendship in this closed community, it’s one of those films where you’d love to know how everything played out over the years.  Especially as they’re supposed to be shutting the whole place down.  Simply from a documentary viewpoint, what wouldn’t we give to have this sort of living record of something comparable like historic Les Halles, the Belly of Paris.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Similar city street urchins found in Mira Nair’s SALAAM BOMBAY!/’88.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/02/salaam-bombay-1988.html