KILLER JOE (2011)

Now in his late 70s, this film is a likely end of the line for director William Friedkin. It also feels like an end of the line for all the Neo-Noirs made after the Coen Brothers’ BLOOD SIMPLE/’84 displaced old-school noir revival pics like BODY HEAT/’81 . . . but it’s probably not. Here, the story is one of those triple-cross murder-for-hire tales where a debt-ridden, thick-headed slacker botches up an easy-money inheritance plan; with a rumbling undertow of violence that erupts for a bloody climax. Adapted from a 1990 play by scripter Tracy Letts, it must have felt fresher on stage at the time. Friedkin works hard to jazz up his presentation, and, with the exception of Juno Temple as a thick-tongued virginal temptation for Matthew McConaughey’s unyielding hitman, he pulls out some smart perfs from his cast. Especially Thomas Haden Church, who finds his own rhythm & a laid-back wit to show how this cuckold crumbles. But Friedkin won't live within the limits of the material, asking lenser Caleb Deschanel to dazzle us with every shot, which only makes the basic material look as threadbare as the trailer-park furniture these lowlifes collapse on.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Sidney Lumet’s last pic, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD/’07, was also a Neo-Noir, and a darn tasty one.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: McConaughey got the easy showy role and the money reviews on this one. But he sure was gosh-all-mighty careful about what he showed! Watch his big back-side scene. Has anyone ever stood quite so awkwardly nude to keep from going frontal. What a tease.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: After his seriously underrated SORCERER/’77 tanked with audiences & critics, Friedkin never regained the striking audience rapport he’d found on THE FRENCH CONNECTION/’71 and THE EXORCIST/’73. He’s been chasing that lost connection ever since, a poster boy for not trusting your own instincts. His new auto-bio, THE FRIEDKIN CONNECTION, seems fitfully aware of the problem.

JIMMY THE GENT (1934)

This dandy James Cagney comedy is so darn entertaining, you don’t want to write it up, you just want to write snappy ad-copy. Jimmy is Fast, Furious & Funny as a mug who hooks up phony ‘heirs’ with unclaimed fortunes. Bette Davis, in one her best early roles, gives as good as she gets as an ex-assistant who decamped for a classier firm. (Platinum blonde here, Bette’s quite the dish once they figure out her hair.) Her new boss (Alan Dinehart) is also hilarious, suavely pawing Davis between tea breaks. Plus, a gaggle of tasty Warners regulars to play the grieving chiselers & wiseguys, with Allen Jenkins getting the best gags as Cagney’s chief stooge. Michael Curtiz slams his way thru in a neat 67 minutes and doesn’t put a foot (or a camera) wrong. And he manages this breathless pace without dropping a gag, plot reversal or character bit, all without a speck of background score to help move things along. The main event has Cagney locating the real heir to a mystery fortune, but forced to finagle since the ‘lucky’ heir is hiding out on a murder charge. For a change, the screwy plot mechanics really add up, but it’s the push-and-pull squabbling of Davis & Cagney that gives this that something extra. Makes you wanna go to the movies!

DOUBLE-BILL: When Davis hit the heights with MARKED WOMAN/’37, one Warners exec called her the female Cagney. But Warners didn’t like using their top two assets on the same project, so their only other film together was THE BRIDE CAME C.O.D./’41, a coarse comedy they plow their way thru. The big drama they didn’t share was 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING/’32. Cagney was in the middle of a contract dispute, so the part went to Spencer Tracy on loan-out; the only time Tracy & Davis were paired.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: This was released just months before the Hollywood Production Code clamped down. So, we still get dialogue like this - CAGNEY to Golddigger: Look baby, what would you do for 500 bucks? GOLDDIGGER: Umm, I’d do my best!

PRO URODOV I LYUDEY / OF FREAKS AND MEN (1998)

The late Russian writer/director Aleksey Balabanov sets this strange, bewitching, ultimately confounding story of corruption, dependence & pornography in a sepia shrouded Pre-Revolution St. Petersburg. It’s really an amoral cautionary tale about society’s illicit desires. A doctor whose blind wife ignores him, preferring to coach the singing boy-soprano Siamese twins he adopted as infants. A widowed engineer with a bad heart who finds chaste love and an executor for his estate in his housemaid, leaving his grown daughter under the servant’s financial protection. The secret brother of the housemaid, a serial pornographer who specializes in S&M-lite, with elderly spankers who whip the naked bottoms of delectable young ladies. A list of bums soon to include the blind wife and the engineer’s orphaned daughter. It’s an unlikely group, yet Balabanov turns the oddest episodes into sexual mind-game roundelays with alternating upper-hands and, eventually, absurd tragedies as endgame. Balabanov steers us thru these dreamlike destinies with a master’s control of pacing , composition and silent-film grammar, memorable and inexplicable. Balabanov, only 54 at his recent death, is best known for violent films about crime in modern Russia, but this might prove a better entry point for many.

DOUBLE-BILL: David Cronenberg’s Freud/Jung bio-pic, A DANGEROUS METHOD/’11, didn’t quite work. (Keira Knightley is quite the stumbling block.) But its concerns and obsessions might look clearer after this.

ABOVE SUSPICION (1943)

After 18 years & nearly 50 pics, this was Joan Crawford’s M-G-M swansong . . . and it’s not bad at all. A sort of sub-Hitchcockian edge-of-WWII adventure for Joan & Fred MacMurray, honeymooners pressed into a bit of espionage for the Brits. Hitchcock had gone down this path himself to tremendous effect on FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT/’40, but this script looks to his British films, cherry picking from THE 39 STEPS/’35; THE LADY VANISHES/’38 and especially THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH/’34. (They actually steal the concert hall assassination, tossing aside half the suspense by explaining the plan post-event.) House megger Richard Thorpe had his gifts and here he seems to wake up about a third of the way in, with a major assist from lenser Robert Planck who gets some real texture into his shots and keeps Crawford from looking like a mannequin. He even finds some glam in MacMurray’s square jaw. (Then Fred uses that jaw to sing a Schubert lied!) Basil Rathbone, Reginald Owen & a surprising Conrad Veidt bring solid support to a film which, on its own terms, works pretty well. Still, it’s a bit of a downer to see the sometimes off-puttingly intense Crawford pared down to companion status. Two years on, MILDRED PIERCE/’45 would come to the rescue.

DOUBLE-BILL: Silly as this one is, it’s much better than Leo McCarey’s similar, decidedly odd, ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON/’42, a big Cary Grant/Ginger Rodgers vehicle which probably sped this into production. Instead, try Gregory Ratoff’s clever indie, PARIS UNDERGROUND/’45 with Constance Bennett. That gal gets in & out of trouble all on her own.

WRECK-IT RALPH (2012)

Ever since those cobbling elves did a bit of overnight work for that struggling shoemaker, toys, pets & even plants have been leading busy, double-lives after the lights go out. Now, we’ve got video games mixing it up after the arcade closes for the night. Where screen characters from different machines (made in different eras) visit neighboring machines that run with different programs & rapidly evolving levels of digital sophistication. It’s a heckuva clever idea for a computer animated pic, and whenever WRECK-IT RALPH sticks to this conceit, it’s a treat to watch. The glitch is that co-scripter/director Rich Moore brings a tv sensibility to the package and won’t stick to his program. Bouncing around three or four games, we never get bearings on how the various electronic characters in each machine should behave, so when interlopers clash with the electronic natives, any consequences are nothing more than random zaps or harmless explosions. GAME OVER/RESET makes for a pretty inconsequential happy ending. The main story involves Ralph, the trash & bash villain of FIX-IT-FELIX. His quest to just once be the good guy has him seeking glory at other arcade console games which puts him in danger while leaving his own game Out-of-Order. If anything, the story has too much going on, and the many references to other kiddie classics leaves this one with an unsatisfying magpie quality. (THE WIZARD OF OZ/’39, gets a particular workout at the SUGAR RUSH console, though, in deference to Uncle Walt, the villainous King Candy in this Disney production is more loony Ed Wynn than stuttering Frank Morgan.) Jack McBrayer is just about perfect as the voice of that goodie two-shoes, Fix-It-Felix, but the rest of the starry vocal cast overdose on one-note characterizations. Happily, the last act stays with SUGAR RUSH long enough for us to get a feel for its design, which does wonders for increasing the participation factor. But this is one of those films where you keep thinking how much better it could be.

DOUBLE-BILL: Don’t miss the DVD’s Bonus Short, PAPERMAN/’12, last year’s Oscar® winner for Best Animated Short. A gorgeous b&w (with color accents) big city romantic fable about a chance meetings, skyscrapers and a blizzard’s worth of paper airplanes.

A STOLEN LIFE (1946); DEAD RINGER (1964)

Bette Davis had two shots at playing good twin/bad twin. First, near the end of her glory years (1937-‘46) in A STOLEN LIFE; and again, at the start of her gory years, soon after she relaunched herself with WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?/’62. The earlier film is a first-class production, as shy Bette falls for Glenn Ford’s young dreamer only to watch helplessly as her more assertive twin sister moves in, marries the boy, then makes Ford over into a miserable go-getter. The film holds back coyly (much like Bette #1) before finally letting us meet the twin sister, but when they do, director Curtis Bernhardt & the Warners tech department make a swell job of it. Lots of cutting-edge trick shots for the two Bettes, with crosses & various overlapping bits. It‘s still impressive stuff. Even more fun is Dane Clark as the angry-young-artist type who almost makes ‘Nice Bette’ into a ‘real woman.’ This underappreciated vet out of NYC’s Group Theatre, combines the showiest aspects of fellow Group Alumni John Garfield & Elia Kazan in this neat supporting turn and all but steals the pic. Too bad Bette only has eyes for Ford. In the second film, the twin sisters haven’t seen each other in 18 years, as if one film were picking up from the last in real time. And the storyline does play out like an alternate take on the same set-up, but this pinch-penny production looks like episodic tv. The trick shots are front-loaded in this story, and much less effective, mostly static two-shots & stand-in doubles seen from the back. Disappointing stuff, only made worse by the airless megging by Paul Henreid, Davis’s old co-star from NOW, VOYAGER/’42. As 'Nice' Bette’s detective boyfriend, Karl Malden shouts half his lines and Peter Lawford looks much the worse for wear as 'Bad' Bette’s lover. Yet, the film is almost as much fun as STOLEN LIFE. Maybe because things happen accidentally in the first film while everything here is pure pre-meditated malice. Davis must have been in hog heaven; suddenly finding herself big box-office again, with two schlock tour-de-force roles where she only had to lose the girdle to find her character as the nice, dumpy twin; then put on the corset, heels & some good make-up for the rich bitch. Quite the comeback after playing grandmotherly Apple Annie to Glenn Ford’s dapper Dave the Dude in POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES just three years before.

DOUBLE-BILL: While you’ve got your Double-Bill right here, a sweet addition would be the original British version of A STOLEN LIFE/’39. It might be a stinker since the reliably underwhelming Paul Czinner directs his wife, Elizabeth Bergner, along with Michael Redgrave & Wilfrid Lawson. But until it becomes available, we’ll never know. Till then, check out this rare French poster.

HOLD YOUR MAN (1933)

M-G-M moved fast after the huge response to Victor Fleming’s RED DUST/’32, quickly following up with this more modest, but equally irresistible Jean Harlow/Clark Gable vehicle. Scripter Anita Loos loads on Pre-Code attitude right from the start (the ‘meet-cute’ occurs in a bathtub) and then manages an even tougher trick, swerving from racy comedy into sentimental melodrama without seeming to change gears. The story is really tied to Gable’s redemption thru love as a two-bit con-man who surprises himself by falling hard for Harlow, his partner in petty crime. Then, just when he’s planning to make ‘an honest woman’ out of her, his lucky streak runs out. Sam Wood’s helming has unexpected zip, and there’s plenty of moxie in the supporting players, street mugs for Gable and, later, tough, funny broads when Harlow goes to prison. Heck, even dull Stuart Erwin shines as Harlow’s butter-and-egg man. But this one’s mainly the Jean Harlow/Clark Gable show. With youthful sheen & an endearingly cheap haircut, Gable is both period charmer & a contemporary knock-out. Harlow, at least for modern audiences, is so stylized, she’s something of an acquired taste. Don’t fret, when Loos writes the dialogue, it’s acquired in about five minutes.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Watch enough of these ‘30 pics and you’ll discover that one of the few racially integrated ‘work’ settings were prisons. For some reason, in the male facilities, the black convicts were still stereotyped (sympathetically treated, but patronized ‘Darkies’) while female black convicts, as seen here, are played in a manner much closer to their white counterparts. But you can still test your racial sensitivity during a rousing prison rendition of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, where they edit in gag shots of an Asian & a Jewish inmate lustily joining in.

ROMA CITTA LIBERA (1946)

Originally titled LA NOTTE PORTA CONSIGLIO, this was opportunistically rechristened ROMA CITTÁ LIBERA with hopes of riding on the backdraft of the burgeoning international success of Roberto Rossellini’s Neo-Realist ROMA, CITTÁ APERTA/’45. But, while the film was shot on real back street locations, revealing Rome’s hidden underbelly, stylistically, there’s little ‘Neo’ and not much ‘Realism’ going on in this post-war ensemble piece. Instead, under the glossy gaze of Aldo Tonti’s slick noir lensing (the best thing in the movie), we follow the ironic trail that a pair of stolen pearl necklaces take as they get traded, mislaid & even re-stolen over the course of a long Rome evening. Interlaced vignettes showcase the life of a soft-hearted second-story man; a suicidal romantic loner; a typist who’s behind in her rent; a few cast-off lovers & crooks; a lovelorn American soldier boy; and an amnesiac politician who all come in contact with the wandering pearls. In theory, the story anticipates Max Ophüls LA RONDE/’50 and THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE . . ./’53), but in practice the film is a silly bit of fluff that advances its storyline thru coincidence & sentimental flourishes. (Though, speaking of coincidence, it does feature Vittorio De Sica, later one of the stars of EARRINGS. Here looking more like Charlie Chaplin than ever; click on our poster, he's the grey-haired man in the center.) Marcello Pagiero, who played a partisan in OPEN CITY, directs, keeping his fine cast moving forward. But there are just too many holes in the story for it to hold water . . . in any style.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Composer Nino Rota, not one to let a good musical theme go to waste, repurposed much of this score for Fellini’s I VITELLONI/’53.

SCHASTYE MOE / MY JOY (2007)

Sergei Loznitsa moved over from documentaries to features with this ironically titled, over-praised Road Pic, a wintry journey into the Ukrainian heart-of-darkness. The film starts out in a recognizable fashion as a young truck driver heads out and meets a few eccentric types (deranged war vet; teenage hooker) before heading off into uncharted territory in an idiotic attempt to avoid a traffic tie-up. Hopelessly lost, he encounters villains on all fronts, from savage roaming thieves to uniformed thugs, before disappearing from the narrative. So much for our näif Candide. By now, Loznitsa has tossed in a few flashbacks to WWII era atrocities, presumably to show how little mankind has changed, before piling on new cases of human misery, climaxing in a violent epiphany that feels forced, caged off an old nihilist’s bucket-list. Oddly, the film has little documentary flavor to it, even during the long drives to nowhere. Perhaps Loznitsa is going thru a molting stage for better things to come. His latest, a WWII story called IN THE FOG/’12, has been well-received. But then, so was this.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: For a more persuasive view of Russian backwater towns & attitudes, try Andrey Zvagintsev’s stunning family drama/thriller THE RETURN/’03.