LARCENY (1948)

Dull programmer from dull journeyman megger George Sherman, breaking from his usual quickie Westerns to helm this jerry-built film noir.*  Too bad, it’s nutty enough to have been dumb fun.  John Payne, fresh off a surprise hit with MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET/’47, plays front man to a gang of con artists run by reliably amoral Dan Duryea.  On this job, Payne’s wooing small town war widow Joan Caulfield (in fast career decline), feeding her a line about raising cash for a memorial to her late husband while really planning to take the money and run before anyone’s the wiser.  But to the surprise of no one, he falls for the lady and tries to get out of his bargain with Duryea.  Even with avaricious moll Shelly Winters doing every low-down trick she can think of to keep Payne off the straight & narrow.  (Winters still in youthful flush, jaw-line intact.)  With plot & characterizations already tumbling toward inadvertent non-sequitor, we rush toward a third act where things turn positively ludicrous.  Easy to imagine someone else bringing a little pace & style to the proceedings to get away with this crap.  But with Sherman giving the orders, don’t get your hopes up.  Dreary stuff, right down to the repurposed dialogue and sets.  The cast phones it in, protecting themselves with indifference.  All except Caulfield who, as an actress, proves some kind of terrible.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: To see what can be done on this sort of thing (and with this sort of budget) check out next year’s noir thriller IMPACT/’49.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/impact-1949.html   OR: *Just as Sherman’s career was winding down, he finally got an A-list/full budget assignment when John Wayne tapped him for BIG JAKE/’71, one of the generic Westerns Wayne cranked out post-TRUE GRIT.  In the event, Sherman took ill and Wayne directed much of the pic himself sans credit.

RABID DOGS / CANI ARRABBIATI (1974)

This late film from Italian horror pioneer Mario Bava comes without the expected giallo elements (no bared breasts/no primary colored palette), but in its less flamboyant way reps something of a return to form for the director.  (Or would had it received a proper release.  Instead, two decades on the shelf before it came out.*)  Alarmingly nasty, often downright vicious (very proto-Tarantino*), it’s a suspense-filled hostage drama centered on a botched robbery that sends three criminal thugs (‘Doc’ and two feral accomplices) on the run, killing one curvy young thing to get past the cops, kidnapping the dead girl’s friend for protection.  Ditching their damaged vehicle, they commandeer the car of a father driving his sick boy to hospital and force him to take them (and the girl) out of the city.  Bava allows some pretty broad acting (call it Italian Method Enthusiasm; only the father holding back), with beautifully laid out story beats so the police don’t have to behave stupidly just to keep the plot moving.  And the threat of a sick kid needing to see a doctor; a father trying to hold things together; a pretty female hostage fending off backseat advances; a coolly composed killer running the show; and two whack-job partners give Bava plenty to work with.  G’normous George Eastman is particularly good as an oversexed thug nicknamed ‘32.’  (That’s in centimeters, it translates to 12.5 inches.)  Even the comic relief, a chattering female hostage who talks herself into a ride, is made quick work of along the way (Bava knows we're fine with murder as long as it shuts her up), before we reach final destination and the film pivots from sadistic to nihilistic.  Or does right before a shockingly playful twist explains the last remaining unknowns; actions you thought were pure narrative expedience.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Belatedly released in the ‘90s at 86", a further re-edit (with a bit of added footage & scoring) supervised by Lamberto (son of Mario) Bava came out as KIDNAPPED at 96".

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Often mentioned as an influence on RESERVOIR DOGS/’92, Bava’s film only came out five years after Tarantino’s film.  (Though he does credit Bava as a major influence.)

LOCAL HERO (1983)

In an interview on the Criterion DVD, iconoclastic Scots writer/director Bill Forsyth shows off a congratulatory letter he got from iconoclastic Brit writer/director Michael Powell.  And suddenly the influence of Powell’s enchanting Scottish romance I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING is obvious.  In tone, off-beat humor & eccentric town with a wise old contrarian to straighten things out; the celebratory community dance and single outdoor pay-phone to serve a whole town.  Even that film’s famously unseen rich industrialist here made flesh by no less than Burt Lancaster.  Strongly influenced, yet still feeling wholly original as Peter Riegert’s Texas-based oil acquisitions exec is sent off to Scotland to buy up coast & village for his boss’s new oil refinery.  But as this is a pastorale (if t’were late Shakespearean Romance the full title might be LOCAL HERO - OR: The Despoiler Foiled) traveling capitalist Riegert quickly falls for the town & its people, unaware those townies, an unsentimental lot, dream only of riches and profit-sharing.  If not for Riegert’s Scottish assistant (a debuting Peter Capaldi) with his love-at-first-sight crush on an ocean scientist/conservationist (and possible mermaid), along with Lancaster’s passion for the natural wonders of sea & sky, there’d be nothing to stop the momentum toward catastrophic development.  With almost no one doing just what you expect them to do, yet never stepping out of character to land one of the many jokes exploding at odd times & angles all thru the pic.  Beautifully shot by Chris Menges and acted without a hint of pressurized twee (Wes Anderson take note), HERO is a sui generis delight of serious proportions (and purpose), ending with a heartbreaking trade-off of magical realism for hard-nosed melancholy.

ATENTION MUST BE PAID: Both Puttnam & Forsyth were carried to Hollywood on this film’s unlikely success, Puttnam as Head of Production at Columbia; Forsyth on three misconceived projects.  They both quickly crashed & burned, packed their bags, barely worked again.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Before Forsyth’s Hollywood misadventures, another Scottish collaboration for him & lighting cameraman Menges on next year’s equally superb COMFORT AND JOY/’84. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/comfort-and-joy-1984.html

FLEE (2021)

The Animated Documentary, an oxymoronic idea that’s worked as a niche genre (really a niche within a niche as three examples of the form are Middle-East based), starting with the Iranian coming-of-age memoir PERSEPOLIS/’07, drawn in a stylized b&w realization that had little to do with the more realistic tone WALTZ WITH BASHIR/’08 used for its look-back-in-sorrow Israeli military scandal.  FLEE, an Afghanistan to Denmark Bildungsroman, lands somewhere between them, unraveling the truth behind ‘Amin,’ youngest son in a family trying to get to The West, holding fast to his asylum seeker’s fibs.  Structured as a series of confessional interviews between the now 30-something Amin and an old school pal (director/writer Jonas Poher Rasmussen) interviewing him for the film we are watching (very ‘meta’), animation proves a huge improvement on documentary re-enactments.  Loaded with moving family drama & suspense, there’s also a gay angle that might have overloaded things in other hands; not here.  The only constant of Amin’s life in interim country purgatory, the consistently corrupt Russian police.  Equally memorable/dangerous encounters all thru the pic, with a particularly fine set piece involving a Cruise Ship dwarfing their jammed illegal immigrant boat as it glides by.  Here and there, the film is a little shy on keeping us fully informed, but generally too honest and moving to nitpick.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Similar issues beautifully handled in Live-Action documentary style as a gay couple from Mexico sneak illegally into the U.S. in the immigrant saga I CARRY YOU WITH ME/’21.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/01/i-carry-you-with-me-te-llevo-conmigo.html  But FLEE feels closer to the animated docs mentioned above: PERSEPOLIS/’07 and WALTZ WITH BASHIR/’08  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/waltz-with-bashir-2008.html

THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE (1936)

Fourth time ‘round for this popular Hatfield & McCoy tale, here the feuding Appalachian clans Tolliver & Falin.  Director Henry Hathaway, A-listed after LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER/’35 and having made the similar TO THE LAST MAN/’33*, revels in the assignment, using the Great Outdoors to startling effect with those early TechniColor cameras and their painfully slow film stock.  The story and acting pretty much hold up, too.  Fred MacMurray (at his best here/very likable) is the big company engineer sent to sign up land rights for coal production and the rail line to move the stuff.  Only problem, the territory needed runs right thru those two feudin’ clans.  Henry Fonda, who lost his folks in the fighting, is pledged to cousin Sylvia Sidney, a bit of a minx who sees opportunity in MacMurray’s stranger-in-town.  Soon she’s dressing up, going to town and thinking about an education.  But as soon as Fonda & MacMurray come to blows over her, those pesky Falins attack, and romantic rivals suddenly join forces against them.  Hathaway pulls this off with gorgeous early TechniColor (in beautiful shape on a Universal DVD), understated acting for the period (Fonda’s natural rhythm improving everyone around him) and impressive action set pieces.  The story surprisingly violent & tough-minded at killing off friendly characters.  More than mere historical interest in this one.  If only comic relief Fuzzy Knight didn’t repeat the same damn song at every occasion.  Even at a funeral.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The 1923 version of TRAIL starred Mary Miles Minter in her final film role, only 21, but fatally tainted by her involvement in Hollywood ‘s greatest unsolved mystery, the murder of director William Desmond Taylor.  On the other hand, Hollywood’s second greatest mystery has to be: Why was Henry Fonda the go-to guy for early TechniColor features?  Two years in Hollywood and he’s on loan to Paramount for their first shot at 3-strip TechniColor before heading off to make England’s first TechniColor feature, WINGS OF THE MORNING/’37, then a pair for the home team at 20th/Fox in 1939.

DOUBLE-BILL: *If you can find it, that earlier Hathaway Feudin’ Families Film, TO THE LAST MAN/’33 is damn good, if a little stiff at times (especially the women), and features the spectacular debut of 5-yr-old Shirley Temple, star already written all over her.  OR:  For a wonderful comic spin on Hatfields & McCoys, Buster Keaton’s OUR HOSPITALITY, out the same year as the silent version of TRAIL mentioned above.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/our-hospitality-1923.html

LES GIRLS (1957)

Cole Porter’s LES GIRLS, as the billing has it, less Musical Comedy than Comedy-with-Music,  tells its court case in three flashbacks using three different points of view, searching for the truth behind a libelous backstage memoir written by one of the three long-legged gals who once made up ‘Les Girls,’ a touring musical revue led by Gene Kelly.  The ‘girls’ are Mitzi Gaynor, Taina Elg & Kay Kendall, and though its structure was lifted from Akira Kurosawa’s ROSHOMON, that classic couldn’t boast songs by Cole Porter or repartee from John Patrick.  Thrillingly designed, staged & shot (George Cukor directing, with striking visual assistance from Gene Allen, George Hoyingen-Huene and Orry-Kelly’s Oscar-winning costumes), the superbly caught theatrical milieu and attic apartment the girls share, offer bizarre angles that engage Cukor and cinematographer Robert Surtees to find spirited CinemaScopic solutions.  It’s one of those films where the sum is greater than its merely adequate parts: Patrick’s script not as witty as he thinks; Porter in obvious decline (though a fine ballad & a very funny risque song for The Girls).  It’s really Kendall who makes (and steals) the film (she stole every film she was in), hitting a highpoint in a drunken Carmen parody.* And if Gaynor wasn’t Cukor’s first choice, at least he was able to tone down her exhausting perkiness.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Though Classic Hollywood musicals were on their way out, a ‘swelegant’ surge of Paris-centric examples were appearing all at once with GIRLS; Stanley Donen’s FUNNY FACE/’57; Rouben Mamoulian’s SILK STOCKINGS/’57 and Vincente Minnelli’s GIGI/’58, all setting new levels of visual sophistication.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Kendall, showing vocal chops to spare as she rips thru Carmen in a drunken state during one of the flashbacks, was needlessly (if nicely) dubbed by Betty Wand.  Scheduling problems with recording sessions as her contract allowed her to fly back & forth L.A. to NYC where fiancé Rex Harrison was on-stage nightly in MY FAIR LADY?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Kendall even more enchanting next year against husband Rex Harrison in THE RELUCTANT DEBUTANTE/’58.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-reluctant-debutante-1958.html

ONWARD (2020)

More dispiritment from PIXAR.  This one with director/co-writer Dan Scanlon in magpie mode, cooking up a brotherly Road Trip with ‘borrowed’ elements ranging from DUNGEONS & DRAGONS to SHREK and HARRY POTTER.  It’d matter less if he hadn’t used the worst stuff from his sources.  So, from POTTER: unlimited get-out-of-jail magic incantations.  Danger & suspense Begone!  Just as much wrong in the setup: a smorgasbord of fantastic beasts from Days of Yore plopped into modern suburbia where a couple of mismatched teen ‘Elven’ siblings (Kid Nerd; Big Brother Fuck Up) leave Mom behind on a quest to find Dear Dead Dad.  Kid #1 too young to have met him; Kid #2 never said a proper goodbye.  Naturally, this being PIXAR, there’s technical polish in all departments and an All-Star vocal cast, but the adventures are contrived and the characterizations secondhand stuff.  With streaming & pandemic accounting, hard to know just how many people went in on this one (PIXAR film grosses often contingent on how well the one before it did), but the film ought to give pause; the creatives have been going to the same well a little too often.  More like DreamWorks than PIXAR.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Less ambitious & infinitely cheerier, LUCA/’21 had to skip theatrical release, but this PIXAR-Lite is the modest delight its company ought to have crowed about.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html

LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)

James Bond producers Cubby Broccoli & Harry Saltzman pulled Roger Moore, still boyishly dewy at 45, out of tv doldrums as their Replacement Bond after one-shot discovery George Lazenby dropped out and Sean Connery pitched relief for (almost) the last time.  Too bad no one figured out how to properly use him until his third outing in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME/’77.  Instead, business as usual*, but with a cut-rate/generic feel to it as Guy Hamilton, the most faceless of early Bond directors*, leads us thru Tom Mankiewicz’s uninspired drug trafficking caper.  (Regular Bond scripter Richard Maibaum would soon return.)  One nice touch, in a story set mainly in New Orleans & some fictitious Carribean country, calls up far more Black actors in prominent roles than was common in big budget films of the day.  On the other hand . . . stereotypes & voodoo.  We do get Yaphet Kotto as the main villain.  (Hurrah!)  Bond going interracial with a bedmate.  (Yippee!)  Though, lordy! what a bad actress.  (Yikes!)  And you do have to wait far too long for the back-loaded action set pieces.  Best is a Bayou chase sequence for police cars, trucks and motor boats with Moore running from Black bad guys and a Good Ol’ Boy Southern Sheriff.  That’s Clifton James, pretty much stealing the film with his politically incorrect act, chewing tobacco, spittin’ and calling all the Black characters ‘Boy.’  Of course, he calls just abut everyone ‘Boy.’  (Brought back for an encore in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN/’74 which tells all you need to know about that nadir in the series.)  As Bond pics go, this one's nothing special.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Early Bond films tag-teamed not quite interchangeable directors Terence Young, Hamilton & Lewis Gilbert.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Well, almost business as usual.  Where’s ‘Q?’  Also, Beatles music producer George Martin steps in for regular 007 composer John Barry.  Securing Paul McCartney’s title song and paying back by using the melody all thru the pic?

JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH (1996)

After a Stop-Motion animation hit co-directing Tim Burton’s THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS/’93, Henry Selick took full charge adapting this enchanting Roald Dahl scary tale.  (Burton on only as co-producer.)  And you can see what went wrong simply by comparing film to film poster; the latter getting just about everything right.  Classically composed; subtle undertow of melancholy built into perfectly calibrated scale; suggestion of quietude: traits missing in the film.  An orphan’s story (of course!), young James kept in squalid workhouse conditions by a pair of ogre-like Aunties till a magic figure appears with seeds of wonder to bring a dead tree to life with an oversized peach.  The aunties see commercial opportunity; young James sees a way to realize his parents’ dream of a trip to New York City.  Traveling with various overgrown bugs inside the peach, James & the film now transfigured from Live-Action to Stop-Motion, sets off.  Danger and excitement along the way, then unexpectedly touching at the finish.  (Hint: those Aunties show up in the Big Apple to take another bite of the Big Peach.)  But Selick just can’t keep still, pushing busyness for busyness’s sake, very ADHD.  Holding back now & then for one of Randy Newman’s melodically starved vamps.  Paul Terry, a sweet kid who has trouble pronouncing ‘R’s, isn’t much of an actor, but with the rest of the starry cast hamming things up, he is a relief.  And yet, in spite of the workout, the story does click in by the end.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Selick’s next complete Stop Animation pic, CORALINE/09, more on his wave length.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/08/coraline-2009.html