THE CORN IS GREEN (1945)

In Emlyn Williams’ effective, if very old-fashioned, ‘well-made’ play, a stubbornly pragmatic, middle-aged teacher butts heads with a poor but gifted mining town lad, and guides him thru personal missteps to an Oxford scholarship test. An all but foolproof story, and yet its two high-profile adaptations are both near-misses. This 1945 version, with a padded & cosmetically aged Bette Davis, still a decade too young as teacher Miss Moffat; and George Cukor’s 1979 movie-for-tv with Kate Hepburn, all bones & a decade and a half too old. The age factor may not be a deal-breaker, but the play, a sort of gender-reversed PYGMALION affair with autobiographical Welsh accents, is so straightforward that every little detail counts. Cukor’s version also suffers from the structural defects of debuting scripter Ivan Davis (how can you fumble this storyline?), while here, director Irving Rapper can’t make peace with those artificial Warner Bros.’ soundstage exteriors. (You'll find more verisimilitude in this stage-entrance still of Ethel Barrymore’s original B’way production then in either film.)

Still, the basic pull of the story, changing the course of a young man’s life thru knowledge & the right educator, is strong enough to withstand many gaffs. The Davis vehicle now looks a far sight better than Hepburn’s, though a 1969 BBC-Play of the Month with Wendy Hiller, greatest of all Eliza Doolittles as Miss Moffat (that female Henry Higgins) sounds tempting.

DOUBLE-BILL: Find variations on this theme in SPENCER’S MOUNTAIN/’63 and EDUCATING RITA/’83.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Our German poster gives some idea of the film’s content while Hollywood's steers shy of . . . everything!

ROAD TO BALI (1952)

Sixth of the seven self-mocking/self-referential ROAD pics from Bing Crosby, Bob Hope & Dorothy Lamour, it’s the last of the contiguous series via Paramount. (A trip to HONG KONG a decade later was a non-starter with Lamour downgraded to glorified cameo.) Here, the boys are discovered doing their vaudeville act ‘down under’ in Australia. Running away from an over-determined bride, they ship out to dive for treasure, meet up with Princess Lamour and get shipwrecked on a tropical isle where they are greeted as tonight’s main course! Alas, the silly fun of earlier outings now feels a little stale, weighed down by TechniColor, weak songs & reflexive gags. It also doesn’t help that Bing & Dot (in her last starring role) seem a decade older than they did five years back when ROAD TO RIO was the improbable top-grosser of 1948. But hang in there, everything suddenly improves in the extended last act. Better tunes, wild gags that might have come from Frank Tashlin (he’s not credited), some really funny asides from Hope, and a plot that veers into something of a travesty DESIGN FOR LIVING with Lamour wanting a two-fer; an accidental lip-lock for the boys before they go thru a marriage ceremony & share a honeymoon bed. With weirder things to come. After this, they really had nowhere to go.

DOUBLE-BILL: Go all the way back to ROAD TO SINGAPORE/’40 to see how it all started. The formula isn’t quite in place yet which turns out to be a good thing.

O'HORTEN (2007)

After a discouraging shot at Stateside filmmaking (FACTOTUM/’05), Bent Hamer returned to his native Norway for this modest-to-a-fault coming-of-retirement-age fable. Odd O’Horten is a 67 yr-old train engineer who misses his own farewell after-party; misses his final train run; misses the lights-out call at his health club; heck, even his favorite pipe goes missing. With few acquaintances, let alone friends, only his mother holds an emotional claim, and she’s lost to senility. Yet, over the course of a few days, while trying to find a rhythm to his new life as retiree, Odd (yep, that’s his first name) has a series of serendipitous meetings, adventures & personal revelations that wake up his inner life, a world of regrets & feelings he never thought he had in him. It’s easy to see what Hamer’s aiming at, but Odd’s near Job-like acceptance of what’s next is nearer to pathological passivity than to the classic Holy Fools of, say, Peter Sellers’ Chance in BEING THERE/’79 or silent clown Harry Langdon. They brought us along on their journeys to unlikely bliss, Odd just wants to keep his pipe lit.

DOUBLE-BILL: Often lumped together with Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki, the comparison does Hamer few favors. Try an early Kaurismäki like SHADOWS IN PARADISE/’86 or ARIEL/’88, marvels of supple wit, color composition, legerdemain narrative, believable character reversals, and big unexpected laughs.

SINCERELY YOURS (1955)

Incredibly hokey, and more than a bit creepy, this one-off starring vehicle for ‘50s tv & nightclub phenom Liberace adds a half hour of piano specialties in remaking THE MAN WHO PLAYED GOD/’32, an antique vehicle for an old George Arliss & a young Bette Davis. Now, it’s Liberace who loses his hearing mid-concert, only to find new meaning in life playing deaf fairy godfather to strangers in the park by eavesdropping on their lives via binoculars & a newly acquired virtuoso skill at lip-reading.* A big flop in its day (note our pure desperation Double-Bill pressbook ad), it’s not so much bad as odd. (Okay, it’s also bad.) Even the piano playing’s odd. Pulling the rhythm like taffy on pop fluff is one thing, but playing classical party pieces with one foot on the brakes and one on the accelerator can leave you woozy. (One of the writers gets in a sly classical music joke when Liberace asks for requests and a grande dame snob calls for the Scherzo movement from Brahms’ Concerto in B-Flat Minor. A neat trick since neither of Brahms’ two piano concerti has a Scherzo movement, and the key is actually B-Flat Major. LOL - Oh, those Hollywood jokesters! Anyway, the request goes missing, substituted by variations on the Beer Barrel Polka.) Joanne Dru & Dorothy Malone are all glammed up with no place to go as rivals for Lee’s affection; you get the feeling he’ll always stay true to his Steinways, Bechsteins & Knabes.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Going deaf at 12 didn’t stop Evelyn Glennie from becoming the best known solo percussionist in classical music today. (But can she Boogie-Woogie in triple time?)

MIMI WO SUMASEBA / WHISPER OF THE HEART (1995)

Studio Ghibli animation can skew toward the kids (TOTORO/’88; KIKI/’89) or toward adults (WIND RISES/’13; SPIRITED AWAY/’01), but this feature from Yoshifumi Kondô aims at the CW demo, female ‘tweens.’  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)   It’s all junior high rivalries & embarrassment, raging hormones & unrequited first love; led by a scatter-brained girl whose adorable-quotient can be calibrated by the viewer’s age.  Naturally, she’s a bit of an outsider, giggling over possible boyfriends with her BFF girlfriend, reading every book in the library and trying to figure out what direction her life should take.  A question amusingly answered when she follows a wandering cat into a new neighborhood and a new set of interests, including a slightly older boy who knows exactly what he wants.  He’s off to Italy to become a luthier! Something you don’t see in many YA stories!   Hmm, YA stories, maybe writing’s in her future?  There’s a fair amount of charm in the characters and situations (life at home is especially well handled), but nothing to match the sweeping landscape vistas of Tokyo that constantly pull your attention away from the foreground, and a story that never sorts itself out.  Plotlines are abruptly dropped; music & peripheral characters are introduced to little effect; then the film takes a disastrous turn illustrating one of the girl’s perfectly awful fantasy tales.   Ultimately, the whole thing feels like apprentice work.  Perhaps it was since Kondô, who died at the age of 47 without making a second film, was a likely successor to Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli.

DOUBLE-BILL: George Stevens’ I REMEMBER MAMA/’48 is far less sentimental about a young girl’s early romantic writing, sending her back to her notepads with orders to ditch the over active imagination and write about something she knows and feels.

YOUNG BESS (1953)

Startlingly fine, largely unheralded storybook treatment of Elizabeth Tudor’s wilderness years (timed to Elizabeth II’s Coronation Year) is definitely not for the historically minded.* But taken on its own terms, it’s remarkably successful entertainment. Director George Sidney’s other period pieces (THREE MUSKETEERS/’48; SCARAMOUCHE’52) are as bright, shiny & thoughtless as the musicals he’s best known for (ANNIE GET YOUR GUN/’50; SHOW BOAT/’51; ANCHOR’S AWEIGH/’45). But BESS courts an unusually dark & sober look for an M-G-M TechniColor production, presumably reflecting the preferences of cinematographer Charles Rosher, who worked almost exclusively with director Sidney toward the end of his career. How Rosher got away with such a restricted color palette here is something of a mystery. Not that he cuts down on saturation levels or skimps on his signature Hollywood portrait iconography. Jean Simmons (as the young Elizabeth) & her then husband Stewart Granger (as a highly romanticized Thomas Seymour) are positively ravished under Rosher’s lighting schemes. With limited opportunities, Deborah Kerr is fine as step-mother Catherine Parr, while Charles Laughton, with even less screen time, reprising his Henry VIII after 20 years, gives a masterclass on ham acting of genius, catching something large & true in a deathbed scene. In fact, the entire cast is unusually strong, with a bracing dash of strangeness to the Prince Edward of Rex Thompson (later Deborah Kerr’s son in THE KING AND I/’56). And all wrapped up in a Miklós Rózsa score that nods respectfully toward Erich Korngold’s PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX/’39. LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH64ZlgGl0I

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The charges against Granger’s character in the film were anything but spurious. Thomas Seymour’s brother Ned (the film’s main villain) was the good guy of the pair.

L’APOLLONIDE (SOUVENIRS DE LA MAISON CLOSE) / HOUSE OF PLEASURES (2009)

Bertrand Bonello’s sexually frank, but stately tour of a turn-of-the-last-century high-end Parisian brothel is meticulous . . . and, as GIGI’s Gaston Lachaille might say, a bit of a bore. Lolling about the lounge & dens of iniquity, we watch as rich, blasé middle-aged men pass silent judgement on the high riding breasts of available girls in their late teens to late twenties. Any expectations of stimulating sociability (games, music, drink, conversation) barely materialize, with sex as collateral damage. No wonder half the men in the place are falling asleep. And with all there was to do in Paris at the time! Occasionally a crisis flairs up: STDs; pregnancy; a ghastly physical mutilation that turns a girl into a female Gwynplaine (THE MAN WHO LAUGHS/’28). But the biggest crisis comes when the house is forced to close from rising rents & rumors of changes in the law. (Bonello isn’t exactly spendthrift with narrative details.) It leaves the girls, little more than indentured servants of the house, with little future to speak of. At its occasional best, the film floats just above the floor, like one of the prostitute’s opium dreams. But the texture grows wearily thin, even with Bonello goosing his soundtrack with anachronistic jolts of R&B music.

DOUBLE-BILL: For another look at a brothel that's being forced to close, try ADUA E LE COMPAGNE/’60 with Marcello Mastrioanni, Simone Signoret and a trio of transitioning hookers.

DRACULA UNTOLD (2014)

Hard to know what the producers were thinking on this wholly underwhelming Dracula pic. An origin story out of Transylvania, liberally seasoned with GAME OF THRONES accents, it finds Vlad the Impaler (everyone calls him ‘Vlad’) succumbing to the undead powers of a chalk-faced Charles Dance in order to protect hearth & home from invading Turks. Largely a series of epic battles, heavy on CGI bats, its debuting creative team fails to make the leap from commercials to commercial cinema. In storytelling, dialogue, acting, visual design & composition, hopelessly deficient, often idiotic. (A nighttime battle with half the forces blindfolded manages to put the players as much in the dark as the audience.) The only elements that stand out are the film’s poster art and Vlad’s abs. (Alternate title: DRACULA: GYM RAT.) For a real scare, at the end, an epilogue threatens a modern-day sequel! Happily, soft grosses may have put a stake in that particular undead heart.

DOUBLE-BILL: Francis Coppola’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA/’92 is a dramatically inert, Edwardian fashion show. EXCEPT for its reel-and-a-half prologue: a spectacular, ultra-stylized Vlad the Impaler origin story.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: DRACULA author Bram Stoker supposedly based his character on his employer, the great Victorian/Edwardian actor Sir Henry Irving. Why no one has attempted an origin story that takes off from those two (Stoker was Irving’s valet/dresser) is a mystery.

CHAIN LIGHTNING (1950)

Unlike most Golden Age Hollywood stars, Humphrey Bogart hasn’t got a cache of forgotten gems waiting to be rediscovered. Whereas a Clark Gable might be just as well served with a retrospective of rarities than with his best known stuff, for Bogie, the films to see are generally the films you do see.* That’s certainly the case on this also-ran programmer (last on his old Warners’ contract?) about a WWII fighter pilot who finds his post-war feet testing newfangled jets for airplane mogul Raymond Massey. The main conflict finds Bogie hustling up speed & distance records while his wartime engineer pal Richard Whorf works behind the scenes on a more important, but less glamorous emergency safety pod unit for the plane. And there’s competition off the job, too, for plush, smoky-voiced Eleanor Parker. But journeyman megger Stuart Heisler can’t make the romantic triangle ring, and the special effects are as unimaginative as they are unconvincing. It’s another deservedly forgotten Bogart vehicle.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *One little known Bogart pic very much worth reviving is BLACK LEGION, an eye-popping KKK takedown in Warners’ best muckraking manner.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: On the Warner Archive DVD, the audio-synch is slightly off all thru the penultimate reel (probably three or four frames off). Just enough to drive you a little nuts.