ONE HOUR WITH YOU (1932)

Though much acclaimed in its day (Oscar® nom for Best Pic & a nasty credit fight from demoted original director George Cukor), this typically frothy, typically naughty Ernst Lubitsch musical for Maurice Chevalier & Jeanette MacDonald now looks like a mere sorbet between meatier efforts. Chevalier & Lubitsch had last met on their enchantingly sweet, emotionally resonant THE SMILING LIEUTENANT/’31 and they’d reunite with MacDonald @ M-G-M for their grand finale, THE MERRY WIDOW/’34. But Chevalier & MacDonald would first do LOVE ME TONIGHT/’32 under Rouben Mamoulian, a near-masterpiece made just as Lubitsch was shooting the sublime TROUBLE IN PARADISE/’32. It all puts ONE HOUR somewhat in the shade. But it’s modest fun, if a bit stiff on its feet in the early Talkie manner. A loose adaptation of THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE/’24, the first comedy of manners, marriage & mores to display the full ‘Lubitsch Touch,’ this film got a quick rewrite, via Samson Raphaelson, while Lubitsch finished THE MAN I KILLED (an uneven, if fascinating straight drama). In this one, Chevalier & MacDonald play a happily married pair who still neck in the park & even sleep in the same bed. (Take that, Production Code!) But who’s that flirt going after Maurice? Why it’s Genevieve Tobin, Jeanette’s best friend. And that eunuch hounding Jeanette? It’s Maurice's good pal, Charlie Ruggles in the film’s funniest perf. Is mutual infidelity a sort of sexual double negative? Lubitsch Ethics 101.

NOTE: Our poster is from the French-language version, filmed concurrently on the same sets, but with different supporting players.

DOUBLE-BILL: Just choose from the films mentioned above. Make it a festival!

THE SNIPER (1952)

Edward Dmytryk got right back to work after doing time as one of the Hollywood Ten during the Communist witch hunt. But unlike the writers who at least had the option of working thru ‘fronts’ or under pseudonyms, directors had to be on the set. You either went into exile (like Jules Dassin & Joe Losey) or got off the blacklist by ‘naming names’ (like fellow Party Members Elia Kazan & Jerome Robbins). Dmytryk talked; then landed with Stanley Kramer Productions @ Columbia. And who turned up as his leading player? Adolphe Menjou!, the friendliest of all the ultra-right-wing Friendly Witnesses during the initial HUAC hearings. If only the movie were half as interesting as the backstory!* Instead, it’s a reasonably effective, docu-flavored thriller, with a bleeding-heart liberal agenda, about an unassuming killer, a mentally unstable young man who tries, tries, tries to control his homicidal outbursts, but can’t forget where he hid the key to his trusty carbine. Even a self-inflicted wound can’t stop the madness while his panicky calls to his old prison shrink go unanswered. Guess he’ll just have to kill again. Two of the shootings still retain a nasty kinetic kick to them, and lenser Burnett Guffey gives the real San Francisco locations a good workout, but the film goes awfully flat when no one’s being stalked. *They did tweak the famously dapper Menjou image by shaving off the trademark moustache & losing the snappy suits. And his acting improves by it.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: DIAL 1119/’50, a little M-G-M back-lot number, tackles a lot of the same issues, but works it up in a cleverly stylized form.

IOLANTHE (1982)

Just as the D’Oyly Carte Opera was closing down after purveying all things Gilbert & Sullivan for 107 years, PBS/BBC began taping most of the famous comic operettas, largely without D’Oyly Carte participation. Bit of a missed opportunity, what? Worse, most of the shows used stunt celebrity casting in a major role (Vincent Price, Joel Grey, etc.) and cuts were made to fit time slots. Not the case with this IOLANTHE. As a production, it’s useful rather than inspired, but it gets enough across to show this series at it’s most valuable. Iolanthe is a beautiful fairy who drifted from her set and had a child with a mortal. Not just any mortal, mind you, but the Lord Chancellor! Now, her grown son has fallen in love with the Chancellor’s young ward, a sweet thing so lovely that all the Members of Parliament want to marry her . . . even the Lord Chancellor. Worse, Iolanthe’s son is ashamed to tell the girl that he’s ‘half a fairy!’ (That is, fairy from the waist up, mortal from the waist down. Thank goodness!) The show is everything you’d want from a G&S classic: tuneful, hilarious, tongue-twisting, cock-eyed patriotic, and terribly topsy-turvy. Some of the comic numbers race by too fast to make their mark, but most of the singing is very good, as is the orchestra & chorus. (The conductor, Alexander Faris, was a D’Oyly Carte holdover.) The production indulges in a bit of technical hocus-pocus which now looks dated, but then the original production in 1882 was technically famous for its use of electricity instead of gas. The fairies even wore electrified tiaras at the finale. Just try not to grin as the House of Lords march about singing: ‘Bow, bow ye tradesmen, bow ye masses; Bow, bow, ye lower middle-classes.’ NOTE: Our poster is from the original LP recording of 1951 which features an incomparable perf of The Nightmare Song by the great Martyn Green. It's on various free web sites and worth a few clicks to find.

CONTEST: A current Supreme Court Justice quoted from IOLANTHE at a press conference after being nominated. Name the Judge, the G&S character referenced & the gist of the quote to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the NetFlix DVD of your choice.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008)

‘Animated documentary’ sounds oxymoronic, but Ari Folman’s daring piece of creative journalism might be the most exciting leap in the form since Errol Morris redefined documentary technique in THE THIN BLUE LINE in 1988. The niggling difference is that every documentarian since Morris has gained from his work, while absolutely no one else has taken the animation plunge. But even if this film proves sui generis, Folman’s film, with David Polonsky heading the visual realization, counts as a stunning success in its own right. We follow an Israeli vet who is trying to piece together his shattered memory of the ‘80s war & occupation in Lebanon. Specifically, his part in the infamous massacre of Palestinian refugees by the local Christian ‘Falangists.’ Did the Israeli army just let this happen? Did they encourage it? Where had he been at the time? We go along on interviews with men he fought with, commanders who gave the orders and reporters who had their own viewpoint on what was happening. Astonishing stories, and the visual technique lends a kind of mesmerizing, horrible beauty to the face of war. It draws you in & distances you at the same time. And unlike the ghastly rotoscope-based/motion-capture techniques, it doesn’t deaden expressions or emotion. The computer assisted drawings remain jarring & alive, always at the service of the stories. Folman probably makes a mistake at the end when he shifts to actual video footage of the horrific scenes in the Palestinian Camp, but you’ll see why he felt obligated to do it.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: No need to be a film purist, use the English track on this one.

LAT DEN RATTE KOMMA IN / LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2005)

From Sweden comes this obsessively sorrowful puppy-love vampire tale about Oskar & Eli. He’s twelve, young & friendless, bullied at middle-school, barely noticed by his divorced parents and unable to ‘solve’ Rubic’s Cube. Eli is also twelve, er . . . a hundred & twelve! She lives next-door with a guardian, is able to ‘solve’ Rubic’s Cube, but can’t eat a thing off the smorgasbord. They’re like Wendy & Peter Pan, but with reversed genders; he’s waiting for puberty to kick in, she’s stuck on the cusp forever. It’s a great set up for the usual vampiric sex-substitution racket, but director Tomas Alfredson smothers everything with so much poetic sensitivity that all the blood is sucked out of the film along with the occasional victim. And the actors are so slow on the up-take, they might as well be zombies. Undead fanciers will appreciate the look of the film, the snow-bound dream landscapes, and some amusing effects (watch for a swift, satisfying cat attack), but there won’t be a lot of converts.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: You can see everyone’s frozen breath in the chilly outdoor scenes, but shouldn’t our little vampire exhale without showing any mist? After all, she’s a cold blooded thing. And it would look way cool; a Nordic variation on not being reflected in a mirror.

DOUBLE-BILL: Anybody see the Stateside remake, LET ME IN/’10? Worth a look?

MILDRED PIERCE (1945)

After 18 years and nearly sixty films at M-G-M, Joan Crawford took two years off before starting @ Warners with this classic MotherLove/Murder Mystery melodrama. Her big career gamble paid off: Raves, Box-Office & Oscar®, a movie-Queen trifecta, and the film is still, within certain parameters, very effective. Michael Curtiz’s swanky helming makes the most of its So-Cal stylings (the beach house, the curvy lines of Mildred and her restaurant, a decade’s worth of hair-dos & shoulder-pads), and his crackling pace & fluid camera help camouflage some unwieldy plot elements that were added to juice up James Cain’s original novel. At heart, it’s still the story of a sacrificing mom who works so hard at pleasing her disdainful, self-centered daughter (Ann Blyth), she can’t see the monster she’s raised. Crawford makes the most of Mildred, such a relief after those WWII adventures & tony B’way adaptations back @ M-G-M, but she also can’t help making a meal of it. And the script does Blyth no favors, giving the game away on her entrance. (Or perhaps it’s just that the plot twists & psychological underpinnings now look threadbare from overuse.) The rest of the cast are just great with exceptional work from the underrated Bruce Bennett as husband #1 and from Eve Arden as the restaurant manager with a wisecrack for every situation. She’s irresistible.

DOUBLE-BILL: Producer Jerry Wald must have liked attempted suicides and flashbacks. He used it first in THE HARD WAY/’42 with Ida Lupino & Joan Leslie as sisters who are a lot like Crawford & Blyth’s mother & daughter. Jack Carson is plenty good in both pics, but he's at his very best in the earlier one.

ANSIKTET / THE MAGICIAN (aka THE FACE) (1958)

This major work from Ingmar Bergman remains far less known then THE SEVENTH SEAL and WILD STRAWBERRIES, which came out the year before, or THE VIRGIN SPRING, which followed. But FANNY & ALEXANDER/’83 partisans (hands, please) should jump on this early thematic cousin. Max von Sydow & Ingrid Thulin (fetchingly dressed as a young man) lead a ragtag 19th century ‘medicine show,’ a traveling wagon that features magic acts, love potions & ‘magnetic’ cures. They find themselves holed up at a rich man’s estate where their character & skill are put to the test by a houseful of local authorities and learned skeptics. Bergman labeled this a comedy, and there is a fair bit of ribald country larking going on in the parlor, bedroom & beyond (a bit too robustly played), but the main interest lies in the struggle between an entertainer and his audience. Doubly difficult here because Sydow is something of a fraud, but not without a measure of real psychological power in spite of having to play mute while in character. The inconsistent tone of the story takes some getting used to, but by the third act, which climaxes in a tour-de-force funhouse scare scene, everything Bergman touches really is magical. So, hang in there. (Oh, and if you haven’t yet seen FANNY AND ALEXANDER, be sure to get the full European cut, not the shortened Stateside theatrical release.)

SARATOGA TRUNK (1945)

Ingrid Bergman & Gary Cooper went directly from the stiff TechniColor prestige of Ernest Hemingway’s FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS/’43 to this decidedly odd, if playfully entertaining romantic adventure from Edna Ferber. Sam Wood megged both, though you’d never know it; editing rhythms come & go, huge frame-breaking close-ups startle, and all the characters flirt with neurasthenia. (There may have been post-production hanky-panky in the gap between filming & its post-war release.) With her two loyal servants (Jerry Austin’s remarkable little person and Flora Robson’s equally remarkable mulatto maid), Bergman sails to America hoping to avenge her late mother’s reputation and find a rich husband. She blackmails herself a cash stake in New Orleans, then goes North to Saratoga to find herself a railroad baron. But can she ignore that tall handsome Texan who’s been helping her along the way? He isn’t just bidin’ his time, you know. (In fact, the film is unusually frank about their co-habitation.) Bergman had famously cropped her hair into a sexy boyish bob for the Hemingway pic, so the Warners team felt free to make her up . . . as Hedy Lamarr! Not really a good look for her. Oh well, they tone it down in the second half. Watch for a great supporting turn from Florence Bates, the old bat. She plays a sort of proto-Elsa Maxwell character, that tubbly self-created society hostess whose decades-long influence over the super-rich was nothing more than an elaborate confidence trick. Naturally, she’s the nicest person in the whole show.

HARRY BROWN (2009)

As blunt as its title, HARRY BROWN is a vigilante picture with senior citizen Michael Caine as the avenging angel. That’s the gimmick; and that’s about as far as it goes. His lower-class neighborhood is in decline, friends & relations are under assault, drugs & violence everywhere you look and the police seem unable or unwilling to take on the creeps. Sound familiar? Clint Eastwood had just taken on similar duties to far richer effect in GRAN TORINO/’08 which found Dirty Harry hitting old age as it touched on race bias, family ties, big city isolation and cross-cultural values. Plus, Clint even gets to be funny.* Hell, Charles Bronson was plugging baddies in DEATH WISH V when he was 73. As a gimmick, Grandpa Vigilante is commonplace. That said, the film is reasonably effective on its own terms, and there’s a nice turn from Emily Mortimer as a sympathetic detective who connects with Caine before connecting him to the payback attacks. Newbie helmer Daniel Barber tends to overcook the atmosphere, some drug-addled grotesques are too amusing to be much of a threat, but he holds to a pleasingly measured pace that fits the storyline. At least, until the messy last act which has to stretch to connect all the narrative dots.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Try this with GRAN TORINO and see if you agree.