THE PRIZE (1963)

Four years after Alfred Hitchcock’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST reset the bar for espionage suspense/thrillers with comic edges, they were proliferating in the new James Bond series & cutesy variants like this Paul Newman starrer.* Featuring a Kommie Kidnapping Konspiracy in the midst of the Nobel Prize ceremonies, it’s worth a look, but coarse & dull rather than witty & sharp. And positively chock-a-block with lifts from the earlier film courtesy of Ernest Lehman who wrote ‘em both. (So who’s he gonna sue for plagiarism, himself?) We get twists on the famous crop-dusting scene; a living room ‘swapped-out’ to hide a crime; a plot point’s worth of imbibing; that disrupted art auction relocated to a Nudist Convention; a sharpshooter to save the day at the finale; even Leo G. Carroll. And many more; lifts not so much quoted as diminished. Mark Robson, not a helmer to trip the light fantastic, shrugs off lousy tech work (those process plates!), but won’t shake a leg to lose a reel of running time. Fortunately, the late scenes give up on wry sophistication to find more comfortable footing playing the suspense straight. Add on the winning Elke Sommer, a good sport in her first Hollywood lead, and you’ve got a workable proposition.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Two years on, Newman moved from a reasonable facsimile to real if regrettably lesser Hitchcock with TORN CURTAIN/’66, yet another Iron Curtain espionage/scientist yarn.

MEGAN LEAVEY (2017)

It’s all there in the poster: Rin Tin Tin goes to Iraq.* A fact-inspired/inspirational story about the real life Megan Leavey, a marine who came from a broken home and found a better life working the (literal) dogs of war; found love (canine/permanent; human/temporary); took an injury with her dog/partner; and fought to recover her health (mental & physical) and the dog they said couldn’t be adjusted for adoption out of the war zone. How is it? Well, quite okay; or is until it goes a bit Hallmark haywire in a too predictable third act. (Dog people won’t mind.) In her first feature, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite (a rare woman given a shot at helming a war story) doesn’t exactly get everything out of the situations (she’s no Kathryn Bigelow!), but also doesn’t push them harder than necessary (she’s no Kathryn Bigelow!). Kata Mara looks awfully delicate to make it thru marine training, while other top players (Edie Falco, Common, Bradley Whitford) are over-qualified for what’s asked of them. But it’s a nice story and a nice film.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: *Now in Lassie’s shadow, RIN TIN TIN was the bigger star in his day, with a real WWI backstory, nicely told by biographer Susan Orlean of ORCHID THIEF/ADAPTATION/’02 fame.

THE PROMISE (2016)

Another wannabe David Lean epic, terribly old-fashioned as filmmaking (which is fine), barely adequate as involving story (which is a problem), about the Armenian Genocide by the Turks during WWI. A systematic slaughter, still unacknowledged in present day Turkey, the film was largely ignored on release, yet generated major organized, presumably Turkish, social media ‘trolling.’ The production was put in motion by the late Kirk Kerkorian, an Armenian-American who trafficked in movie company assets as if he were trading Monopoly Board Game Properties, it’s less Passion Project than Religious Indulgence, those church pay-offs that helped you skip Purgatory in the AfterLife. Kerkorian was a particularly dreadful example of one of those money manipulators who left mortally damaged properties behind them while personally coming out ahead . . . and never a look in the rear-view mirror. No doubt, he knew this would tank ($100 mill price tag, but who really knows?), wisely kicking off the year before it came out. In his late 90s yet still keeping the loss off his credit/debit balance sheet. And the film? Of course, the true story is devastating, but here we burrow into DOCTOR ZHIVAGO/’65 territory as young medico Oscar Isaac (with moist Omar Sharif puppy-dog eyes) sidelines a mousy wife during WWI for a grand passion with citified beauty Charlotte Le Bon (underwhelming) amid social/political eruptions. She’s already spoken for by beaded American journalist Christian Bale, doing double-duty (ZHIVAGO-wise) as both Tom Courtenay and Rod Steiger. Meanwhile writer Robin Swicord & writer/director Terry George are unable to hold back the witticisms (‘Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder’) though the dramaturgy rarely falls below acceptable. If only the film were significantly better . . . or significantly worse. But then, film quality is something Kerkorian never gave much thought to.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Is there an alternative on this woefully undercovered subject? Till one shows, try Elia Kazan’s AMERICA AMERICA/’63 on his Anatolian Greek Uncle’s journey out of Turkey.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Five to One the title refers not to anything in the film, but to Kerkorian’s personal ‘promise’ to get this made before he died.

KAOS (1982)

The title refers to a place, not a condition; in Sicily, where Italian writer Luigi Pirandello was born. (And returned to in later years.) For writer/directors Luigi & Vittorio Taviani, it caps their best decade (ALLONSANFAN/’74; PADRE PADRONE/’77; NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS/’82*) in an area of Italy new to them. The stories all turn-of-the-last-century, but set in conditions primitive enough to seem timeless, aided by the Taviani non-interventionist style and from their collaboration with poet/screenwriter Tonino Guerra. A long haul at three hours, but never a drag. After a brief prologue to ‘bell the crow’ who flies over spectacular scenery to find the stories, we start with THE OTHER SON where a mother longs for her two boys, gone to America with no word back while a third son, living nearby, is ignored by the mother who believes him cursed. MOONSICKNESS is, of all things, a sort of naturalistic Italian werewolf tale. Sexy, scary, compassionate, it’s a classic Taviani peasant fable. Then, comic relief in THE JAR, about a rich land owner (Ciccio Ingrassia, a ringer for Vincent Price), a huge olive container, and a repair job gone wrong. Funnier than these earthy fables usually are, even if it outstays its welcome. No surprise that the final tale, REQUIEM, is the most serious. A revolutionary themed story of farmers working without land rights, but insisting, against the wishes of the estate owner that they be given some land where they worked & where they will die to be buried in. Then a brief, utterly lovely memory piece for an aging Pirandello come home, to recall his mother’s dangerous boat voyage to join his father in exile. Each beautifully (and distinctively) handled, the experience somewhat similar to a Late 1800s/Early 1900s Romantic Symphony. Something by Mahler or Bruckner in Four Movements: ANDANTE; ALLEGRO; SCHERZO; ADAGIO. (The epilogue quotes Barbarina’s arietta from Mozart’s MARRIAGE OF FIGARO.) The film works perfectly well one story at a time, but you’ll likely watch straight thru. A remarkable work.

DOUBLE-BILL: *As mentioned above, all three essential, though the first is hard to find.

THUNDER ON THE HILL (1951)

Waylaid by a flood of biblical proportions on the way to her hanging, brittle Ann Blyth (and guards) gets stuck at a convent hospital isolated by the storm & knee-deep in displaced locals. Angry at her fate in the world, even at the delay in her end, she goes from caustic contempt to hopeful humility as Claudette Colbert’s Sister Mary (fabulous here) takes time off from crisis nursing duties to break rules sacred & profane on a mission to prove the girl is innocent of her brother’s murder. Fortunately, she’s been convicted on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, a tissue of plot contrivances from playwright Charlotte Hastings to set up a rickety whodunit with Catholic trappings.* Toss in doubt-filled fiancé; doctor & neurotic wife; strict Mother Superior; dotty comic-relief cook; resentful civilian nurse and shake well. Ludicrous as it all sounds, director Douglas Sirk & glamor cinematographer William Daniels (shoring up his rarely used noir credentials) make quite the stylish show of things. Turn off the right side of your brain and enjoy.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: How directors & cinematographers love Nuns in Habit! Especially in serried ranks assembled. A wet dream of rhythmic staging & composition. (Even austere Robert Bresson couldn’t resist the mix of nuns & murder: LES ANGES DU PÉCHÉ/’43.) As for their behavior . . . ? Here, Colbert is willfully stubborn, proud to a fault, disobedient and always right, yet manages to lay all the credit on God. Even when Mother Superior does something as appalling as destroying exculpatory evidence to make her point.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *The play, a three-week flop on B’way under the title THE HIGH GROUND, had a cast that included Marian Seldes, Ruth McDevitt & Patricia Hitchcock.

ENEMIES: A LOVE STORY (1989)

By some distance, the best project writer/ director Paul Mazursky ever got his hands on; but alas not his best film. More comfortable with episodic structures, he misses the thru-line of interlocked story juggling built into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s wild, tragic, sex farce, making this something of a D.I.Y. assignment for the viewer . . . but worth the effort. Ron Silver (looking like Bob of Bob’s Burgers when bared in the tub) is a Holocaust survivor now living near Coney Island in 1949, scratching out a living ghostwriting lectures for rich, popular Manhattan rabbi Alan King. Married to the Polish shiksha peasant who saved him, he’s also carrying on with 'maybe' divorced manic/ depressive Concentration Camp victim Lena Olin. Then, as if life weren’t complicated enough, ‘dead’ wife Anjelica Huston shows up, very much alive and with her own claims on him. Singer runs this emotional CYCLONE Roller-Coaster as a horned-up elliptical roundelay, each new complication a painful laugh of emotion, shock & recognition. You get a taste of how good it could be when Mazursky pauses in the subway long enough for Silver’s eyes to study the directions pointing Right-to-Manhattan; Ahead-to-The Bronx; Left–to-Brooklyn. If only there were more visual wit and control of the purposefully messy storyline. A pivotal clarifying scene with Mazursky as Olin’s bitter husband should help, but doesn’t. Even so, with its fantastical story of a different kind of ‘living dead,’ and a distinctive cast bringing an absurd sense of comic/tragic fate to life, it’s an intensely enjoyable, great idea of a film.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: You get the feeling Mazursky was thinking Sydney Pollack (safe) when he should have been thinking Woody Allen (goosey).  Still, to its credit, as FAIL-SAFE was to DR. STRANGELOVE in ‘64 (square, noble, slightly plodding); so SOPHIE’S CHOICE/’82 is to this.

THE DEAD (1987)

A stunning achievement. John Huston’s final flourish. In practice, nothing more than a long post-New Year’s dinner party (an hour’s worth of screen time), followed by a carriage ride to a hotel for married couple Donal McCann & Anjelica Huston (twenty minutes more). Yet carrying a charge sufficient to send out emotional ripples strong enough to change how you look at the world. Tony Huston’s script (undoubtedly with an able assist from father John), based on one of James Joyce’s DUBLINERS stories, does a miraculous job setting up about twenty dinner guests, and, with an Irish cast to die for & pitch-perfect production, give them just enough head to make the most of the small events, squabbles, foibles and moments of kindness, pity & affection we watch them live thru. You soon know them all, almost intimately, and forgive their faults. (A generous leave-taking blessed by an off-stage song from Frank Patterson’s high, unforced Irish tenor.) Then, over the long ride home, and during a remembrance/confession back at their hotel, the feeling that your world has been shaken by a stranger’s epiphany of long lost love. The film is a chamber piece that reverberates with the overtones of a great singer in a small room.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Among the party entertainments (piano solo, poem, dramatic recitation), the most ancient of the spinster aunts sings a somewhat bowdlerized translation of Bellini’s Son Vergin Vezzosa from I PURITANI in the ruins of a voice. No doubt, Joyce knew a literal translation: (‘I’m a charming virgin in a wedding dress.’) might shock the guests.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Had Yasujirô Ozu been an Irishman (or set a story in early 1900s Dublin), it might have been this. Huston even uses interstitial ‘pillow’ shots between scenes like Ozu.

THE BOOK OF LIFE (2014)

Disappointing. With elements of two recent animations (FERDINAND and COCO*) in the mix (pacifist bullfighter/ musician goes to the land of the dead in search of tru-love), director Jorge R. Guitiérrez proves less in charge than lead producer Guillermo del Toro. And that’s a problem as we get the worst of del Toro’s otherwise considerable style: uninterrupted visual excess. Mexican tradition is plenty elaborate to begin with, and the death enraptured theme tricky to pull off as family fare, but here, every frame is overloaded to the point of sensation fatigue. And it panders to a presumed Stateside commercial base, book-ending the main story with a pointless museum field-trip for a handful of trouble-making U.S.A. school kids. Worse, back in Mexico, the generically feisty heroine comes across in much the same contempo manner. While around her, the film pitches more pop reference gags in dialogue & music than a DreamWorks product. As often the case in these aggressively overactive CGI films, the best things in it are the title or end credit sequences (here the credits) which throwback to old-fashioned hand-drawn techniques (or reasonable facsimiles thereof). And what a difference they make! Clarifying & refining the image; exciting & even more stylish/stylized, but with space to breath. Could it be sold to today’s audience? Pretty iffy.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Not seen here, but COCO/’17 was rapturously received. As for FERDINAND, tough to top Disney’s 1938 short FERDINAND THE BULL, available in various collections.

WIFE WANTED (1946)

Slinky & soigné at the height of her stardom @ Paramount & Warners in the early ‘30s, Kay Francis bid declassé adieu producing a trio of B-pics at distinctly non-soigné Monogram Pictures. This, last of the three, was neatly helmed by Phil Karlson, already smart & efficient in an early credit, and matches Kay to her character as a fading actress going into real estate, but the story doesn’t make enough sense to build any suspense. The business, run by smooth Paul Cavanagh, has two sides, a ‘legit’ real estate company and a fraudulent Lonely Hearts Club marriage racket. (Overseen in a ferociously fierce turn by Veda Ann Borg, the only interesting thing in the pic.) Francis doesn’t know it, but she’s really there to pull in ‘marks’ with her famous name & sexy rep because (surprise!!) the real estate side of things is also a scam operation. Too bad no one explains how this all works, or how she wises up with help (and a bit of romance) from undercover investigating reporter Robert Shayne. Lenser Harry Neumann tries for sheen, but, this being Monogram, subfusc processing holds him back. (What did these films look like on release?) Poor Kay, fading away, like the proverbial old soldier, and at only 41.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Instead, try one of Kay’s best late outings, CONFESSION/’37, stylishly helmed by another Hollywood fade-out, Joe May.