CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER (2006)

An aging, but still vital King & Queen are at each other’s throats; the three sons are in competition for the succession; and a major national holiday looms forebodingly; shall we hang the holly . . . or each other? Wait, that’s THE LION IN WINTER and this is another Chinese historical epic from helmer Zhang Yimou. Chow Yun Fat & Gong Li are the Emperor & Empress, but she’s not the birth mother which is a good thing since she’s dallied with one of her ‘sons.’ Now, the Emperor has commanded the royal physician to poison her (she knows all about it) and the Empress is plotting a military coup (he knows all about it). So when the wife of the palace doc turns out to be the long lost birth mother, all hell breaks loose in some spectacularly staged warfare set inside the confines of the enormous palace grounds. (The Emperor has a special detachment of men all costumed as Irma Vep!) It’s all exciting and gorgeous to look at, if not always perfectly clear, but Yimou can’t properly integrate the sweeping action sequences with the intra-familial drama. Still, it’s quite an eyeful.

ROYAL FLASH (1975)

George MacDonald Fraser adapted his own satiric swashbuckling novel and must have been terribly disappointed with the results. No doubt, Richard Lester seemed the likely megger after his MUSKETEERS films (Fraser's plot freely samples THE PRISONER OF ZENDA and Dumas's THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK), but nothing gels and there have been no follow-ups. Fraser's implied comic tone feels forced under the stiff staging and Geoffrey Unsworth's ultra-lux lensing, and the impressively eccentric supporting cast (Alastair Sims, Michael Horden, Lionel Jeffries, Joss Ackland) get nothing to work on. In a small bit right at the start, Bob Hoskins supplies just the right tone, but the three leads (Malcolm MacDowell, Oliver Reed & Alan Bates) are all misused, particularly MacDowell whose curdled face drains any surprise out of his cowardly triumphs. (The ladies don't register at all.) Stick with the addictive books or try BLACKADDER with Rowan Atkinson & Hugh Laurie for a bit of the Fraser spirit. (see TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS)

JUST PALS (1920)

This modest Buck Jones rural dramedy(a five-reel feature) was John Ford's first pic @ Fox Studios. The print is in reasonable shape and the film turns out to be a real charmer. Jones was pushed ahead @ Fox to keep Western superstar Tom Mix in line, but under Ford he comes across as a far more natural actor, with a modern style and brooding good looks. He’s the scapegrace in a small rural town whose life is turned about when he falls for the local schoolmarm & also finds himself unexpectedly in charge of a runaway kid hobo. Ford's use of landscape and train settings are so charged with character and drama that the ensuing melodramatic improbabilities seem not contrived, but inevitable. Indeed, the first half of the film may have influenced Chaplin's THE KID/’21, but then the plot piles up as Buck has to save the boy from reward hunters, his girl from a charge of raiding the local memorial fund and himself from a lynch mob! All in 50 minutes! D. W. Griffith remains Ford’s model, but his own voice is already unmistakable.

EXECUTIVE SUITE (1954)

A powerhouse cast helps to jazz up this very square boardroom drama which helmer Robert Wise & scripter Ernest Lehman (in the first of four award-winning collaborations) play strictly at right-angles. Fredric March, Walter Pigeon, William Holden, Dean Jagger & Paul Douglas are the execs up for the top spot when the company president drops dead. Barbara Stanwyck holds the deciding voting shares, Louis Calhern holds some unraveling stock, Nina Foch holds the phone and Shelly Winters (looking very fine) & June Allyson hold hands. There's not enough variety to the drama, but Lehman gives everyone tasty bits to chew on, saving his real ammunition for Holden's tour-de-force final oration. Holden got stuck with this sort of over-articulate speechifying for decades, and he always made it work. But the best perf comes from a shockingly snarky Fredric March who all but becomes Richard Nixon (from back in his ‘Tricky Dick’ days). Just watch him blot the tell-tale sweat off his lip.

BE YOURSELF (1930)

This largely unsatisfying vehicle for Fanny Brice, the real FUNNY GIRL, is her only early Talkie to survive intact.  There’s a certain built-in interest in seeing what made her such a popular performer, but you can probably get closer to what made her legend by checking out her guest appearances in THE GREAT ZIEGFELD/’36 singing ‘My Man’ and in THE ZIEGFELD FOLLIES/’46 for a sample of her no-holds-barred comic technique.  Sketch comedy has a notoriously short shelf life, but she’s riveting just the same. (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/ziegfeld-follies-1946.html)  BE YOURSELF is an antique bit of sentimental tosh with Brice fighting to keep her man ( a boxing champ) from falling for a gold-digging dame.  Billy Rose was her husband at the time and he turned out a few sub-par songs which are slackly helmed by Thornton Freeland.  But check out those lux nightclub designs from William Cameron Menzies.

BALL OF FIRE (1941)

For his last pre-hyphenate credit, Billy Wilder came up with the very cute premise of eight cloistered Professors forced out of their academic shell when they need to research ‘slang.’ But ‘cute’ was never the forte of helmer Howard Hawks and the third act complications devolve into Damon Runyonesque comic mob tropes that only remind you how much better Wilder handled this in SOME LIKE IT HOT/’59. (One of the Profs even references the St. Valentine’s Day massacre.) The ultra-smooth Samuel Goldwyn production polish also tends to slow things down, but the extraordinary rapport between Gary Cooper & Barbara Stanwyck makes up for a lot of rinky-dink twinkling from the other professors. Wile away the longueurs deciding who’s playing Sneezy, Grumpy, Sleepy, Doc, Bashful, Dopey & Happy.

49TH PARALLEL (aka THE INVADERS) (1941)

Staggeringly effective WWII thriller from the writing/directing/producing team of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger follows six survivors from a German U-Boat set aground in Hudson Bay, Canada. Led by a sharp & ruthless Nazi ‘superman’ (Eric Portman), they make their way east in picaresque fashion like one of Hitchcock’s innocent-man-on-the-run pics. Except, no one here is innocent. (Perversely, Hitch would set his Nazi Ubermensch story in ultra-close quarters: LIFEBOAT.) Pressburger structures the film as a series of one-act turns for high caliber actors (Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard, Raymond Massey), but he’s unable to maintain the emotional pitch of the superb sequence set in a self-contained German religious commune which features standout perfs from Anton Walbrook, Glynis Johns & Niall MacGinnis. Technically, the film trickery is something of a miracle (check out the tech credits, yowsa!), plus a score from Ralph Vaughan Williams. It all beautifully tees off the great Powell/Pressburger/ARCHERS films that followed.

CAUSE FOR ALARM (1951)

You can almost hear the edifice of old Hollywood crumbling in this witless one-note thriller manque. Reliable M-G-M vets Tay Garnett & Joe Ruttenberg helmed & shot it, but the film looks & plays like a cheap programmer for Loretta Young in mid-career free-fall. Her hubby (Barry Sullivan) is a bedridden WWII hero who believes that both Young & his best-pal/doctor are trying to kill him. He’s mailed an incriminating letter and the suspense comes in watching Young sweat in mounting panic as she fails again & again to stop delivery. No joke, that’s the plot! The last act brings unintentional laughs as Loretta jumps in fear at every ring of the doorbell. And everybody's stopping by! (It's like a Carol Burnett sketch.) This all might (that’s might) have made some effect if she & the good doctor actually were trying to do the creep in (shades of Garnett’s THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE), but with the lamentable Dore Schary running M-G-M, thinking small was the norm.

MYSTERIOUS MR. MOTO (1938)

The fifth entry (of eight) in the endearingly odd series is one of the best. Norman Foster, who directed six episodes. co-wrote the tight script which opens with Moto (the irreplaceable Peter Lorre) escaping Devil’s Island with fellow inmate Leon Ames. Naturally, Moto is secretly there on a case, budding up to Ames because he’s part of a British-based murder-for-hire scheme. Back in London, Moto gets Ames to employ him as valet so he can uncover the whole criminal organization. (Lorre has a great time playing duo Asian stereotypes off each other in a manner that only a German refugee Hungarian Jew working in Hollywood could have done at the time. And without a speck of jaded irony.) Physically, Foster does wonders with the low-budgets he had to work with and he has far better casts than similar series usually got (Henry Wilcoxon & Erik Rhodes both give tasty perfs). He's even able to keep the dopey comedy to a minimum on this one. Go Moto!