DUNKIRK (1958)

Though dwarfed by Christopher Nolan’s mammoth 2017 production, this major effort from Ealing Studios, recently moved from their boutique compound to join M-G-M/U.K., works well on its own terms; even better as companion to Nolan’s impressive, if rather impersonal telling.  (Running a half-hour less, Nolan’s characters tend to get lost in the mix.)  The story structure is much the same: Nazis overrunning Europe in doubletime; abandoned British Units in France fighting their way to Dunkirk & a boat ride home; ill-prepared homefront, coddled by over-confident government & press; miraculous amateur flotilla of small commercial vessels & pleasure craft (some pressed into service, some spontaneously joining in) saving a remarkably high percentage of military surrounded by Germans at Dunkirk.  Assigned for some unremembered reason to journeyman helmer Leslie Norman (no doubt a stickler for holding to a budget; Ealing in its last gasps), it’s good, if standard WWII moviemaking of the period, only dropping the ball technically on big ships at sea.  Those cyclorama skies!  (Faking ships at sea always a sticking point at the time.*)  Luckily, the safe & solid cast, nearly all of them war vets, still able to pass or given age-appropriate roles (Richard Attenborough, John Mills, Bernard Lee top-billed), have their characters down pat and carry us thru any rough patches.  (All instantly recognizable even under a helmet which proves something of an advantage compared to Nolan’s film where scorecards would have come in handy.)  Only Malcolm Arnold’s warmed over score disappoints.  An obvious choice after BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI/’57, he coasts on that film’s music cells.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Michael Curtiz and the Warners special-effects department able to convince us back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, but maybe we were just caught up in the enthusiasm, the over-sized water tank built for THE SEA HAWK/’40; along with Errol Flynn’s dash and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s sweeping scores.

DOUBLE-BILL:  The obvious one, DUNKIRK/’17.

SPUTNIK (2020)

Moving with misplaced confidence between the obvious and the obscure, this one-trick-pony of a Sci-Fi thriller feels largely pointless (when you can make out what’s going on in the dank crepuscular atmosphere) before wrapping up with gory, unearned nihilism and, what else, shameless kiddie sentimentality.  Naturally, it was a big Ruskie hit.  It’s 1983 (the analogue technology the best idea in here since everything hands-on filmable) and two Cosmonauts are having a ‘Houston, We Have A Problem’ moment during reentry.  (What’s the Russian equivalent for ‘Houston?’)  Turns out, one of the men is bringing a little something back with him, an alien life form living inside his body.  Can he and the Alien be safely separated?  That’s the setup director Egor Abramenko washes/rinses/repeats at a faceless facility that serves as a secret space recovery gulag.  Run by that prolific prodigal second-generation mediocrity of Russian Cinema, Fedor (Sergey’s scion) Bondarchuk, here only acting.  (Count your blessings.)  Going outside the box (literally), he calls in brilliant nonconformist doctor Oksana Akinshina after traditional approaches fail to solve the issue.  Only problem, his idea of a solution may not be her idea of a solution.  The deliberate pacing gives you an awful lot of time to recall how many variations of this scenario you’ve seen (two or three times a season on STAR TREK, nyet?) which wouldn’t be a problem if there was a swing to the thing, or even a bit of self-awareness that we ain’t watching Andrei Tarkovsky . . . or John Carpenter.*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Take a step back from this film’s curated 1983 setting to the circa 1982 alien terror of John Carpenter’s THE THING.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-thing-1982.html

A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959)

As Hollywood’s most benevolent B-pic producer, dozens of famous & forgotten directors in his debt for their start, Roger Corman tends to get something of a critical pass on his own directing efforts.  Sure, he was always up against low-budgets (casts, scripts & sets often dire), but what does it cost to put the camera in the right spot & control pace?  Happily, this modest riff on the old 2-strip TechniColor MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM/’33) is good dirty fun; small enough to work within his limited abilities.  Dick Miller, raised from supporting heel to lead, is a ‘mad’ busboy (with artistic leanings) at a Beatnik Coffeehouse.  He’s this film’s Lionel Atwill, the ‘Mad’ Sculptor turning dead bodies into accurate statuary.  Waxed figures in the first film; here, covered in clay by Miller.  (Actually, his dead animals & people look more like they’re been coated in fondant icing.  A much funnier idea than anything Corman comes up with.)  Not a scare in its 1'7", but harmless.  With one really good comedy bit from future Limeliters folksinger Alex Hassilev.  He’s the real deal and what a difference it makes!  (Too bad they didn't have the club crowd snap their fingers rather than applaud after each poem or song.)  Elsewise, generally stick with Producer rather than Director Corman.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM/'33.  OR:  For 3D fanciers, the inferior remake HOUSE OF WAX/’‘53.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/mystery-of-wax-museum-1933.html

THE LOVE PARADE (1929)

Coming off ETERNAL LOVE/’29, his largely unhappy final silent, Ernst Lubitsch didn’t merely make a smooth transition to the Talkies, but a revolutionary one with this sparkling musical.  Something that must have seemed impossible at the time.  A sort of reverse on THE MERRY WIDOW (filmed by Lubitsch in 1934*), this time, a randy Ruritanian officer is sent home from Paris in punishment for too many dalliances.  Working with so-so composers (no Franz Lehár equivalent on the Paramount lot!), Lubitsch can’t lean on the music, but he barely needs to, especially in the astonishingly fine & free opening two reels; the Paris-set prologue with Maurice Chevalier breaking the fourth wall to translate action (everyone speaking French) as he’s gotten himself in trouble by having one too many garters!  His mistress furious, her husband furious, the valet useless, a gun loaded with blanks, and a dog adding a Lubitsch Touch to save face.  Moviemaking audacity unprecedented at the time.  And while the rest of the film shows 1929 Early Talkie longueurs (as well as ‘live’ on set singing), it’s not far behind this miraculous opening.  Back in Sylvania, Queen Jeanette MacDonald can’t find a gentleman groom willing to emasculate himself in marriage and play consort for life.  But Chevalier has unexpectedly fallen in love and thinks he can work things out; he’ll play bad boy till the Queen comes down to his level.  Shot with perfectly judged alternations of scale (huge court settings vs. intimate personal spaces), and supported by councilors and a servant couple to mirror the romance (the amazing physical moves of stage star Lupino Lane still a wonder), the film far outpaces anything out at the time and, nearly a century later, still gives off its distinctive charm.  Technical improvements, and the first true Music Video sequence, would come in next year’s MONTE CARLO/’30 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/monte-carlo-1930.html) , though only this film offers a chorus of dogs barking in harmony.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Lubitsch wouldn’t get another budget to support this level of sheer spectacle until THE MERRY WIDOW over @ M-G-M, a final pairing for Chevalier & MacDonald.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-merry-widow-1934.html

FINGERNAILS (2023)

In only his second feature film, co-writer/director Christos Nikou is clearly headed deeper & deeper toward shallow waters on this futuristic fable, amusingly clad in 1970s apparel, technology & design, on the nature of Tru-Love: Now Scientifically Testable!  Or is for those willing to have a nail yanked out and micowaved (or some such gobbledygook science) alongside their partner’s plucked appendage topper.  (No doubt, they need the root end for the procedure.  But why use the premium index finger instead of the useless toe pinky?)  Though already a proven match with partner/fingernail skeptic Jeremy Allen White, Jessie Buckley senses something is missing in her relationship and secretly takes a job at Luke Wilson’s Love Testing Institute.  Guiding couples thru various bonding exercises before ripping a nail out for compatibility testing, Buckley finds her antenna rising to senior work associate Riz Ahmed.  And between all the mutual sexual tension, it’s but one surreptitious fingernail test before she conclusively confirms a level of attraction.  But isn’t her partner a perfect match?  Is it possible to love two people at once?  Is the test flawed?  And should results always dictate behavior?*  Played in hushed/halting tones as if thru a glass darkly, everyone hoping for spontaneity, but sounding more like they can’t remember the next line.  And who can blame them with barely enough material to fill a SNL comedy sketch.  (The ones that go on after WeekEnd UpDate.)  Trying for droll, Nikou misses badly, pivoting in hopes of earnest depth & real feeling, only managing fingernails on a chalkboard.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner covered this idea with impressive brevity intro’ing ‘On A Clear Day‘ with ‘And who would not be stunned to see you prove; There's more to us than surgeons can remove?’   The film’s hard to take, but the soundtrack does have Barbra Streisand at her absolute vocal peak.

MASQUERADE (1988)

This promising old-school thriller (9/10ths of the way) sees super-rich, 20-something Hamptons orphan Meg Tilley fall for pennyless charmer/pro-yachtsman Rob Lowe just as her venal step-dad is shot to death and her one-time townie High School boyfriend (Doug Savant, very good) shows up as the local cop on the case.  Dick Wolf, in an early pre-LAW & ORDER writer/producer credit, tries for a Patricia Highsmith vibe, but shies away from her knowing perversity, holding fast to old Hollywood ways that can make the film feel like a remake of some 1940s triple-cross film noir.  Rigged out with a John Barry score & David Watkin cinematography (the pair recently Oscar’d for OUT OF AFRICA/’86) who turn in stunning work too posh for the situation.  (It needs a bit of dirt under the fingernails.)  Greedy motivations, twisty plot ‘reveals’ & general moral morass keep it involving, but a better reason for watching is a chance to see Lowe trying out a path not taken, playing a morally (and possibly bi-sexually) compromised cad who never knew what hit him when he fell for his victim and tried to go straight.*  He’s very effective.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Though camouflaged by 1988 levels of nudity (so many tushes!), the film is very old Production Code in most ways, with needless sidesteps in character, plot & behavior to protect us from repressed gay angles; serving up sealed lip/old style movie kisses to signify chaste love; and virtue triumphant.  It all hints strongly at a far more dangerous first draft (by co-scenarist Larry Brody?) lost when someone (competent/faceless director Bob Swaim?) got cold feet.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL:  Lowe’s usual line about a lack of strong acting opportunities blames his own good looks; cursed as too pretty for serious roles.  Maybe.  But that ‘curse’ didn’t hurt Alain Delon, whom he often resembles here.  Delon even played a similar sexy cipher in PURPLE NOON/’60, an acclaimed real Patricia Highsmith adaptation you may know from its remake, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY/’99.  Neither film quite as good as its rep.  On the other hand, when Delon did give Hollywood a try, he got nothing but crap roles, just like Rob Lowe later got.

THE STONE / KAMEN (1992)

The unique cinema of Russian auteur Aleksandr Sokurov, more contemplative mood pieces than narrative, work (when they do work) by coming together subliminally inside your head.  But this particularly severe example is just too off-putting to connect.*  Hard to know what (if anything) is going on as the handsome young caretaker of the old Crimean home of doctor/playwright Anton Chekhov, discovers the long dead author dressed in underclothes and soaking in the tub.  For the rest of the film, these two will speak a few lines, share a meager repast, wander thru the home and eventually the grounds & nearby village, and ceaselessly stare (with unnatural interest?; with longing?; with deep empathy?) at each other.  Filmed in misty/mottled b&w and given a purposefully muffled soundtrack, the slightly distended image almost, but not quite anamorphic, meant to be left distorted in compressed Academy Ratio, with their physical closeness making it all that much more uncomfortable.  (When asked, Sokurov bristles at any ideas of homoeroticism.  But if not sexual, then surely sexualized?)  By the very last shot, as the men leave the dining room together after devouring each other in a nose-to-nose staring competition, they do seem headed for eternity not bed.  Chekhov famously said that if you show a gun on stage, you better use it.  Maybe that’s what’s missing . . . a gun.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: The film’s much debated look feels strongly influenced by the soft-focus photography Rudolph Maté cooked up for Carl Dreyer’s VAMPYR/’32, itself a similarly unconventional vague mood piece of a film.  Though there the mood is horror, here it’s unknowability.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/05/vampyr-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Or is until the film’s striking penultimate shot.  A long take of a mountainside, shot like a profile, showing an incline that has the look of a cemetery (though it’s not) with a dense fog moving across the view.  More Swiss Arnold Böcklin than German Caspar David Friedrich.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Sokurov had a surprise Art House hit with his one-shot wonder RUSSIAN ARK/’02 (more views than all his other films combined), but his distinctive style is probably best served (and at its most communicative) in FATHER & SON/’03.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/father-son-2003.html

RAISING CAIN (1982)

After twenty years of dissatisfaction, Brian De Palma finally saw the film he thought he’d made in a ‘fan cut’ of CAIN put together by De Palma acolyte Peet Gelderblom.  Basing his continuity on De Palma’s original script, Gelderblom retained all the footage, just rearranged to help this confusing thriller finally hit its marks.  Frankly, still a debatable point, but De Palma happy enough to swap his original cut for Gelderblom’s as new ‘official’ Director’s Cut.  Lots of problems & confusion remain (purposeful & inadvertent), but you now at least can see what De Palma was going after, riffing on Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO/’60 (no shower scene, but split personality; cross-dressing; slow sinking car, embellished with passenger; disinterest in plausibility; etc.) and trauma-inducing Dad psychologically experimenting on his own kid, from Michael Powell’s PEEPING TOM/’60.*  John Lithgow, under the silliest hair of his career, is the mixed up husband of ditzy Lolita Davidovitch.  (An actresses who’s really only good under one director . . . and De Palma not the guy.)  She starts the screwball rolling by giving Lithgow a gift meant for ex-lover Steven Bauer (whom she still carries a flame for) and vice versa.  This merely a dodge for the main action (PSYCHO again), but the misdirection falls flat since Lithgow’s constant hallucinations mean everything plays as a non-threatening dream, while Bauer (I know, I know, he’s in the John Gavin role) distracts because he’s so good, so attractive we keep wondering why he didn’t have a major career.  (Maybe, like Gavin, he became Ambassador to Mexico!)  De Palma sets up a few of his signature all-in-one camera extravagances; amusing as ever, but adding little to our involvement . . . or his.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Powell’s career never really recovered from the controversy & DOA box-office results on TOM.  (It took decades to find champions.)  Ironically, you can equally make a case that Hitchcock’s career never really recovered from the controversy and blockbuster commercial success of PSYCHO.  Discuss.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Frances Sternhagen is very good as the child psychologist taking on Lithgow, but who does De Palma think he’s fooling giving her a black (rather than grey) wig to set up Lithgow’s inevitable escape later in the pic?

DRAGONSLAYER (1981)

Producer/writer Hal Barwood & writer/director Matthew Robbins, present at creation as part of the Spielberg/Lucas/USC circle, left spotty records on their own after early success that probably peaked with this fantastic (in both senses of the word) Medieval fable.  A terrifying & enchanting  Sorcerer’s Apprentice tale, it was probably doomed commercially when Paramount publicists saw visions of STAR WARS dancing in their heads (note copycat poster & cast that visually matches Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher & Alec Guinness to Peter MacNicol*, Caitlin Clarke & Ralph Richardson).  In hindsight, that echo you hear is more LORD OF THE RINGS/GAME OF THRONES, and not in a bad way.  Odd this box-office disappointment never developed a cult following.  Richardson, who merely tops-and-tails the film, but seems present all the way, is the aging Sorcerer, called upon to slay the eponymous flying, fire-breathing beast.  But, judging himself too old to complete the journey, let alone the task, sends apprentice MacNicol, who channels his ‘late’ master as long as he controls the glowing amulet he inherited.  Along the way, virgins sacrificed yearly to appease the dragon; the young male courier entrusted with the commission revealed as a damsel in disguise (Clarke); a virgin Princess learns the King has exempted her from the sacrifice lottery and heads to the slaughter.  Meanwhile, our Dragon is raising a family.  Yikes!  With superb art direction, a nightmare-inducing practical marvel of a dragon and crystal clear narrative, only Robbins’ action chops  prove a bit shy.  He does better whenever something out of the ordinary or magical is called for.  Like whenever Richardson is on screen.  (10/31/23

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  MacNicol (in his film debut as is Clarke) is quite good, but facially, a disconcerting cross between STAR WAR’s Mark Hamill and sweaty exercise guru Richard Simmons.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Those GoT dragons never did much for me.  For a comparison with this dragon, check out the scary beauty who shows at the end of Disney’s SLEEPING BEAUTY/’59.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/12/sleeping-beauty-1959.html