MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT (1959)

This all but lost work from Paddy Chayefsky (the simultaneously over and under-rated scripter) is something of a find. A May/December romance, set in the savory world of the NYC rag-trade, it takes Chayefsky from the lower middle-class Italian-Americans of MARTY/’55; past the middle-class Irish-Americans in THE CATERED AFFAIR/’56; and on to upper-middle-class NYC Jews. Ultimately, for better & for worse, they’re all pure Chayefsky, wounding themselves with false pride & over-articulating the obstacles of life. But he’s on his best form here, as is Fredric March, superb as a widowed women’s apparel manufacturer (with a spot on accent). He falls hard for Kim Novak, at her most sympathetic, as his young, pretty receptionist. Both of their families have trouble with the idea and Kim, who’s not quite over her divorce, isn’t sure what she wants. They each get the dramatic/emotional wake-up calls they need to figure things out, a bit too conveniently, but the fine supporting players help to cover the plot mechanics. Lee Grant is dandy as Novak’s gal pal (with a Shirley MacLaine hair-do) and Martin Balsam, as March’s put-upon son-in-law (he’s one of three actors kept from the original stage production), finds a terrific balance between angst & humor in his showstopping monologue. Delbert Mann, who also helmed MARTY, is a lot more fluid here, helped by some tasty NYC locations & even more by the tight confines & florescent lighting in the workplace scenes. Hem the guy in and he looks like a real moviemaker.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Chayefsky must have known that a presentable rag trade widower would never have lasted two years without remarrying. These guys can’t open a can of soup for themselves. No doubt, that explains the best scene in the pic, when a nosy widow with an irritating manner of speech sidles into March’s bedroom as he changes his shirt and hilariously starts selling her own attractions. Actors looking for a fresh audition piece should check it out.

THE LAST AMERICAN HERO (1973)

At 24, Jeff Bridges is already a fully-developed screen presence in his first leading role. He’s a good ol’ boy from No Carolina who learned how to drive and how to flaunt authority running moonshine for his dad on the backroads. The fact-inspired story tells how he put his talents to better use on the stock car circuit. There’s nothing particularly new or surprisingly going on here, but Lamont Johnson helms with a pleasing attention to the details of character, cars & location that never feels forced. He lets us register the local color on our own. And it’s cast like a dream, Gary Busey is just right as Bridge’s brother while Ned Beatty, Geraldine Fitzgerald & Valerie Perrine all find legit avenues for their heightened personalities. As the moonshining father, Art Lund gets the worst of the script, he and his two boys might be auditioning for DEATH OF A MOONSHINER or something, but it passes. Neither the film nor Johnson’s rep ever quite took hold (the lame, misleading title certainly didn’t help on this one), but it’s just the sort of big little film we hardly see anymore.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: If you click on the (ghastly) poster to enlarge it, and read the copy, you'll discover that Jeff Bridges was the 'Dude' right from the start.

DANTON (1983)

The political battles that brought the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror to a final climax are reduced in Andrzej Wajda’s period piece to two opposing camps: Maximillian Robespierre’s absolutists (played by French-dubbed Polish actors) and the moderating voices of Georges Danton & his followers (played by bellowing French). On its release, parallels between these Revolutionaries and the fight for democracy in Poland (at the time Solidarity OUT/Soviet-backed General IN) were much debated, and certainly helped it gain critical traction. Thirty years on, the analogy looks specious (it's more Kerensky’s Socialists & Lenin’s Bolsheviks, perhaps) and the film itself looks intellectually tattered & self-important. The acting & staging fall someplace between amateur re-enactments and one of those thuddingly didactic Roberto Rossellini exercises, with Jean-Claude Carrière’s script giving us orations instead of dialogue. As the journalist Desmoulins, Patrice Chéreau comes the closest to building a character, but everyone else might as well be auditioning for 1789: The Musical.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Hilary Mantel, who recently won the Mann Booker Prize for WOLF HALL, her historical novel about Thomas Cromwell & Henry VIII, has an equally fine book set during the French Revolution, A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: One of Eric Rohmer’s last pics, L’ANGLAISE ET LE DUC/01 (THE LADY AND THE DUKE) is even talkier than DANTON! But it’s good talk, between a conservative English lady in France and a liberal Duke of the Realm who debate politics, life, love & decor while the Revolution closes in. Even the physical production is fascinating with painterly CGI effects used to create a sort of tableau vivant on many exteriors. Lots & lots & lots of subtitles to read, but worth the effort.

JEANNE EAGLES (1957)

Kim Novak is at her considerable worst in this hopeless, and hopelessly inaccurate, bio-pic about the short, unhappy, drug-addled life of cult actress Jeanne Eagles. Not that Kim’s alone in her misery, Jeff Chandler, Agnes Moorehead, and the rest of the cast all give booby prize-worthy perfs under George Sidney’s coarse megging. The whole film sinks like a stone, save for some stylish lensing from Robert Planck. It’s worth a chuckle to see a Hollywood sojourn where they stick Jeanne at the wrong studio with the wrong director in a film role she never shot, but when they end the film with her singing her way to immortality in some fictitious early Talkie called FOREVER YOUNG, you almost feel as sorry for Novak as you do for Eagles.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: For those who still believe that Alfred Hitchcock didn’t work well with actors, have a look at this film before watching Novak's next. That’d be, VERTIGO/’58.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The real Jeanne Eagles appeared in a few silent bits back in the ‘teens, but her work only survives in two of her three feature films. Her one silent with John Gilbert (helmed by Monta Bell), MAN, WOMAN AND SIN/’27 is hard to get hold of, but it does exist. Her two Talkies were each remade by Bette Davis, the lost one, JEALOUSY/’29 as DECEPTION/’46; and Eagles real claim to fame, THE LETTER/’29. Herbert Marshall, who played Bette Davis’s cuckold in the 1940 remake, plays the lover in ‘29. Naturally, this is more of a filmed play than the famous William Wyler version of 1940, but once you adjust to its stop-and-go rhythm and to the style of acting, it’s quite devastating. And Eagles was the real deal, an American Duse on heroin. Unforgettable. (NOTE - THE LETTER has just come out as a Warner Archive VOD or special order!)

SANSHIRO SUGATA (1943)

Even with twenty minutes clipped by the wartime censors, it’s easy to see what a natural Akira Kurosawa was in this debut pic. The oft-filmed story is something of a Karate Kid for grown-ups as we watch the questing Sugata choose the new martial arts discipline of Judo over the more traditional Jujitsu. The time period is 1880 which gives us a pleasing mix of old world sensibilities & values meeting head-on with a modernizing world. Indeed, the film’s most interesting character is Sugata’s final opponent, Gennosuke Higaki, a mustachioed compact tornado of a fighter, dressed in the dapper three-piece suit of a British undertaker on holiday. Once Sugata learns that humility & wisdom are as important as skill & strength in making a champion, and after winning a psychologically difficult match against the father of the girl he’s taken a shine to, the stage is set for a Sugata/Higaki throwdown. In this early work, Kurosawa hasn’t worked out all the kinks in his editing style, but the pacing & composition are fully in place and those glowering skies & windswept grain fields where the last battle occurs not only show the strong influence of Soviet silent cinema, but also point ahead toward masterpieces to come.

DOUBLE-BILL: Er . . . SANSHIRO SUGATA PART II?.

SANSHIRO SUGATA, Part Two (1945)

Sanshiro Sugata was brought back for more Judo in Akira Kurosawa’s sequel to his popular debut. (Two films came in-between.) But the difference in how the war was going, and how it was perceived on the homefront, turned the discrete propaganda of the original (a call for all Japanese to come together) into something more concrete. This film opens with a big American sailor bullying his little rickshaw driver. But not to worry, Japanese filmgoers! Sanshiro Sugata is on the spot to toss that Yankee in the drink! And so it goes. The film winds up running two stories. In one, Sugata reluctantly enters a demonstration match where he takes on a champion boxer (and the West symbolically), and the second story, which holds far more interest, goes back to concerns from the first film as Sugata confronts the eccentric, karate-trained brothers of Higaki, the man he had bested in the original film. The story, a Kurosawa concoction, turns out another lesson for Sugata: a great master not only follows the rules, but knows when he must break free of them. The film is a bit ragged compared to the first, even though Kurosawa shows more confidence in breaking a few rules of his own. There’s a neat trick during the final fight in the snow (real snow, shoeless fighters, brrr!). Look for a slim tree that gets karate chopped so smoothly it holds in place for a moment before tipping in half. Like one of those big candles in an Errol Flynn sword fight.

DOUBLE-BILL: Er . . . SANSHIRO SUGATA PART I?