J'ACCUSE (1938)

Abel Gance, who took silent cinema to its limits in four astonishing films (from LA DIXIÈME SYMPHONIE/’18 to NAPOLEON/’27), never got the hang of The Talkies. Or rather, never got past The Talkies, with sound films stuck in the technical LimboLand of stiffly staged dialogue scenes interrupted by jagged arrhythmic kinetic sequences that might have come from some forgotten silent. Here that’s literally the case with the clumsy inter-cutting of wartime footage in this follow up to his post-WWI screed J’ACCUSE/’19. (Not, as often stated, a remake.) The earlier film, at once awkward & masterly, is as much love triangle as melodramatic frontline war drama. Loaded with coups de théâtre (coups de cinéma?) featuring masses of real soldiers stopping by to shoot a fictional scene before heading back to real war, real shooting, real death. Twenty years on, Gance revisits that film’s endgame battle in a 40" prologue to set up a love & war rivalry between soldiers Victor Francen & Marcel Delaître, the latter with a young daughter & conflicted wife (Line Noro). Only one man is fated to survive a final fatal push into enemy territory, but not before pledging to renounce his love. Picking up post-war, we find Francen denying his feelings for both the wife and the daughter, growing up with a major crush on him. But what can it matter when Francen is too busy to notice, working up a fantastic machine that will prevent future wars. If only his nebulous idea (Gance avoids specifics) hadn’t been weaponized by his own factory boss to use in the upcoming international conflict! It’s enough to drive a man mad . . . and does as Francen suffers enough to get a rise out of all the dead & buried soldiers of WWI. An army of Peacenik Corpses to shock the nations! Overloaded by Gance with enough poetical double-exposure effects to shame the finales of BIRTH OF A NATION/’15 and INTOLERANCE/’16 combined. Appropriate for a career that started out rivaling D. W. Griffith before curdling into the empty grandiosity of a Cecil B. De Mille manqué.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Though not without its own longueurs & overreach, Gance’s 1919 J’ACCUSE (on a fine restoration from Flicker Alley/Lobster Films with a busy Robert Israel score) is overwhelming.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: If only Gance’s plea for peace in 1938 Europe were half as credible as the jingoistic war spirit of his masterpiece NAPOLEON.

TRUE CONFESSION (1937)

Carole Lombard, Queen of Screwball Comedy, is at her screwiest as a pathological liar who talks her way into a murder rap hoping to jumpstart husband Fred MacMurray’s legal career. A struggling lawyer, all he needs to succeed is get her off on a big juicy case . . . if he gets her off. Yikes! (If it sounds a bit like CHICAGO, scripter Claude Binyon started out as a Chicago newspaperman and knows the territory.) While she’s glamorously shot by regular cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff (watch them send-up Garbo as Queen Christina while in a jail cell), the character is Lombard’s most extreme.  Demented, often unlikable, near psychotic. Were the filmmakers aware of just how far they were pushing things? And while not involved with the murder, she’s guilty of just about everything else in here, and gets away with it all, gets rewarded for it. (Not that anything’s been planned or thought thru.) Perhaps the lack of consequences, or rather the success of consequences, is why the film plays better on second viewing. But even on first viewing, a crazed spark of magic appears when John Barrymore shows up to start the second act as a retired criminologist/barfly and deftly shuffles off with the rest of the film as a would be blackmailer.

DOUBLE-BILL: Strictly speaking, with no rich upperclass twits in sight, this is more ‘Crazy Comedy’ than canonical ‘Screwball.’ For a prime example of that form, go back half a year to another Paramount Pic, EASY LIVING/’37.

DER STAAT GEGEN FRITZ BAUER / THE PEOPLE VS. FRITZ BAUER (2015)

Nearing the end of his career, German Attorney General Fritz Bauer finally gets a strong lead on the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, but little support in following it. It’s the late ‘50s and Bauer, the rare case of a returned German Jew in the Adenauer government, is both surrounded and stymied by the ex-Nazi officers, many former SS, he’s forced to work with. The last thing they’d want is for Herr Eichmann to go on trial in Germany, spilling long-buried war stories. So Bauer tries an end run, working his operation thru Israeli Mossad agents. Effective, but illegal; and technically traitorous. It’s fascinating true stuff, and writer/director Lars Kraume finds a good new angle with a gay blackmail subplot involving Bauer’s past and, in the present, an assistant on the ‘down-low.’ Yet the material doesn’t reach full potential. The characters come across (the assistant especially well-cast, with the guilty look of a handsome ex-Nazi Youth now going to fat), but trips to Israel, Argentina or Paris miss out on tension & style. Maybe if Kraume had filled us in on some of Bauer’s earlier accomplishments? A major figure in the fight for internal de-Nazification, we only get the info we need at the end of the film. It gives this more than decent film the low impact of a school report.

DOUBLE-BILL: Fritz Bauer is a supporting character in the Oscar® nominated LABYRINTH OF LIES/’14 (not seen here), a similarly themed story that takes place half a decade earlier.

LI’L (P’TIT) QUINQUIN (2014)

As if David Lynch made a long-form BBC/PBS police procedural (like BROADCHURCH) set in Northern France*, Bruno Dumont’s remarkable work is strange & compelling, sometimes too much so. Richly textured in scenic wonder & revolting gore, it’s something of litmus test, especially for the casual viewer who may be thrown off by oddities in place, character & crime . . . or simply bored. At its core, it’s a serial-murder police procedural, with the usual eccentric older detective & junior partner hitting the road to get to the latest victim or question likely suspects while handsome coastal views and farmland vistas roll by. Dumont casts non-professionals with ‘local’ features, but behind the bad teeth & facial tics, the two cops might be Chief Insp. Morse & Sgt. Lewis.* Everyone’s something of a mongrel around here (thinning stock?), including Quinquin, a tough, rascally kid with hearing aid & the slightly twisted face of a fixed harelip. Running roughshod with pals around town when not with his surprisingly sweet girlfriend, he’s closer to the grisly crimes than he realizes. The film is as much a portrait of place as of murder, with Dumont finding his rhythm & character eccentricities in the local terroir. (So unlike latter-day Lynch, imposing quirky sensibilities from creator down.) Made to be shown in four parts on tv, the WideScreen images play even better as a single, stand-alone movie. Given the chance to insinuate, there’s odd charm, fascination and a wild humor to it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *As chief inspector, Bernard Pruvost might be country cousin to classic French character actor Michel Simon.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: *David Lynch usually comes into the conversation on this film. But Dumont is really more Henri-Georges Clouzot (LE CORBEAU/’43) meets Aki Kaurismäki (THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL/’90).

REMEMBER? (1939)

Famous as the Golden Year of Golden Age Hollywood, 1939 also had it’s share of stinkers. Few stinkier than this brutally misconceived cuckold comedy that finds best pals Robert Taylor & Lew Ayres flipping Greer Garson as if she were housing property. Actually, she was property, property of M-G-M; hence this rush job after GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS made her an instant star at the alarming age of 35. Journeyman comedy specialist Norman Z. McLeod co-wrote & megged so give him most of the blame*, but Robert Taylor deserves credit for making an already unlikable character a positive paragon of self-centered upperclass entitlement. Lew Ayres does what he can as a slightly soused third-wheel, but Garson murders every line with her fluted tones and oddly unflattering look. (The fluted tones remained; the look triumphantly revised.) Perhaps nobody on the lot was second-guessing the dailies since producer, writers & director had turned out a big popular hit with TOPPER/’37, a Post-Mortem Screwball Comedy, of all things. Not this time. The film wraps with a bit of chemically induced amnesia. We should all be so lucky.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: While the set-up isn’t all that different from the Lubitsch/Hecht adaptation of Noël Coward’s DESIGN FOR LIVING/’33, that film's execution was far beyond the reach of these hack filmmakers. M-G-M was probably hoping for something along the lines of Joan Crawford in either LOVE ON THE RUN (w/ Gable & Franchot Tone) or THE BRIDE WORE RED/’37 (w/ Robert Young & Tone). Either way, they were aiming low.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Of course, the upside to being a journeyman comedy director like McLeod is that you’re apt to stay out of the way when you’ve got W. C. Fields or the Marx Bros.

I PADRONI DELLA CITTÀ / RULERS OF THE CITY (1976)

Italian writer/director Fernando Di Leo has a modest cult for his bluntly effective, brightly colored urban crime pics. With more crude energy than finesse, his mob stories keep your attention even as they miss on style & technique. Here, his usual qualities (or lack thereof) are reversed, with smartly handled, even swaggering action/chase sequences in & around Rome(?) showing hard-nosed filmmaking savvy in support of a pretty thin story. Progress? (He still can’t stage, shoot or edit a fight to save his soul.) The story pits top mobster Jack Palance against Edmund Purdom’s two-bit loan shark operator, but the real action follows a couple of low echelon enforcers (Al Cliver; Harry Baer) who work up an inside scam that should leave them holding the assets of both sides, and with a cold dish of revenge on the side. Di Leo works up plenty of twists & turns in his street chases, not so much in his plot. Only the unexpected homoerotic angle between the boys surprises. Mostly, this is breezy fun and looks good in the non-anamorphic DVD from RARO-Video.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: An earlier Stateside release (slightly trimmed) came out as MISTER SCARFACE even if Palance looks about the same as usual. And playing Luigi, the loan shark boss, that's the very same Edmund Purdom who took over THE EGYPTIAN/’54 for Marlon Brando and who stood in (and lip-synched) for a too fat Marion Lanza as THE STUDENT PRINCE/’54.

JIMMY P. (2013)

Full Title: JIMMY P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian. And so it is, doubtless to the frustration of anyone expecting a more conventional, plot-driven recovery story. French director Arnaud Desplechin, working comfortably in his second English-language pic, doesn’t spell everything out detailing the case of a WWII Native American vet (Benicio Del Toro) crippled by debilitating episodes of blindness & migraines. Sent to a special clinic in Topeka, Kansas run by Karl Menninger (yes, that Menninger), the staff doctors are unable to diagnose the cause and send to New York for Mathieu Amalric, an uncertified French psychiatrist (well, he tells everyone he’s from France) with a bent for analysis using an anthropological lens. If the wounds aren’t physical, and only triggered, not induced by war memories, might the underlying cause be cultural or genetic? Playing out in opaque, yet fascinating moments of partial revelation, this exceptionally well-acted piece is taken largely from session notes. (Desplechin adds a pleasant, if fictional, romance for Amalric & the visiting Gina McKee for the sake of variety and to help fill in the doctor’s backstory.) With a deep-textured palette punching up period detail (none of that faded photograph crap), the film is often startlingly convincing even if the a la carte narrative choices, which exclude as much as they include, won’t be statisfying to all.

DOUBLE-BILL: Desplechin is at his best in A CHRISTMAS TALE/’08 with a big all-star French cast, including Amalric, a Desplechin regular.

RISEN (2016)

From ‘Affirm,’ a new division of SONY Pictures’ releasing modern stories for the ‘Christian Values’ market, an old-fashioned throwback; a modestly budgeted Biblical Epic that plays as a Judaean police procedural. Joseph Fiennes, beefed up from SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE/’98 days, is the Roman Tribune assigned by Pontius Pilate (Peter Firth, beefed up from EQUUS/’77 days) to find out what’s happened to the body of ‘Yeshua’ post-crucifixion. He’s gone missing! You know the rest: Tribune investigates; meets disciples; questions his own beliefs; fights off old Roman pals; sees the Light; joins the Tribe. Kevin Reynolds, who partnered Kevin Costner on Christ-Lite allegories (ROBIN HOOD/’91; WATERWORLD/’95), runs a decent show, but can’t get past boilerplate History Channel/PBS production values; or a Jesus who’s more friendly Camp Counselor than Christ. And while the film is never despicable, like last year’s abomination remake of BEN-HUR, it’s hard to imagine this preaching to the non-converted. Which is pretty much the whole point, no?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Another largely Anglo-Saxon gang of disciples in here.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Reynolds is responsible for one of filmdom’s true oddities, the Easter Island drama RAPA NUI/’94, a film as distinctive as RISEN is anodyne.

A MONSTER CALLS (2016)

Maybe a film can be too imaginative? How else to explain the disappointing commercial response to this wondrous terror-of-childhood dreamscape pic? Or was it doomed by an undeserved/ misguided PG-13 rating? Or simply lost in a tide of similar stories of young kids coping in unique ways with a terminal illness in the family? Whatever the case, the film is too good to miss, even with a couple of miscues that leave the film with an unexpected emotional reserve. (Maybe not a bad thing, that.) Young Lewis MacDougall is outstanding as the inward-looking, artistically talented 9-yr-old, acting out at home & bullied at school as he deals with his increasingly sick mom. Raging against the inevitable, he’s equally hurt by his divorced dad’s wayward attention (living in the States with a new family) and fighting tooth-and-nail against moving in with Grandma Sigourney Weaver (treading warily on a light British accent). Into this emotional mess, the boy, thru dreams & drawings, conjures up a living tree-monster (voiced by Liam Neeson), an alternating messenger of terror, comfort & confounding teaching-fables. Three fables, to be exact, appearing with the inevitability of the Dickensian spirits Marley told Scrooge of, but shown as enticingly beautiful animation. (A digital process with the look of a living watercolor, a marvel to behold.) This leads up to a fourth fable, told not by the imaginary tree-beast, but by the boy; a tale of uncompromising (and devastating) honesty, topped by a final revelation that both closes and expands the circle of life. It leaves you not in tears, but in dry-eyed wonder.

DOUBLE-BILL: Director J. A. Bayona is Spanish, though he’s been working internationally for a few years, now. This may explain why the film brings Guillermo del Toro (with an English accent) to mind. Less the hyperventilating fantasy world of PAN’S LABYRINTH/’06, than the under-appreciated youthful terrors of THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE/’01.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Listen up during the second tale when Fernando Velázquez’s fine score tips its hat with a brief allusion to Mussorgsky’s NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN in honor of its debt toward FANTASIA’s satanic mountain monster.