FATE IS THE HUNTER (1964)

Director Ralph Nelson, a specialist in ‘thinking man’s pictures’ for people who don’t think, ought to have been just the man for pretentious ‘Pop’ novelist William K, Gann, master of pseudo-important corny melodrama (see THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY*).  But FATE gives off something of a bad odor as rising airline exec Glenn Ford tries to prove it wasn’t ‘pilot error’ by estranged war pal Rod Taylor that brought down a commercial jet with 54 on board.  Perhaps sole survivor stewardess Suzanne Pleshette can help the investigators by walking Ford thru all the fatal flight minutiae.  Better yet, Ford wants to recreate the exact flight step-by-step, just as it happened to clear Taylor’s name and find meaning in the tragedy.  That last the sticky bit in Gann’s shallow deep-think.  Sounding especially phony when served up with Ford’s hesitant delivery working overdrive.  He might be the ‘slow-thinker’ in a comedy act.  And poor, likable Rod Taylor, who ought to breeze thru his irresponsible scapegrace pilot routine, overloads on irrepressible life-force, asked over and over to belt out ‘Blue Moon’ to prove his fancy-free philosophy.  Even a simple meet-cute between Taylor and Nancy Kwan comes off as ludicrous.  (She steals the fish he just caught because she’s an ichthyologist.)  Plus supporting roles equally overdone across the board.  On the positive side, lenser Milton Krasner, working in yummy b&w ‘scope, gives off the appropriate glossy vibe, but can’t hide tinker-toy model plane F/X.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *As mentioned, THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY/’54.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/high-and-mighty-1954.html

WHITE SHADOW (2015)

And you thought you had it hard.  Imagine the life of a Black Albino in Africa.  Caught in a cultural trap between prejudice & superstition; in East Africa, not just ostracized but hunted, like an elephant for its tusks, by traders supplying body parts to Witch Doctors who claim it confers magical powers.  Well, you’ll still have to imagine it, since filmmaker Noaz Deshe is either unwilling or unable (I vote unable) to get much across in this first feature.  With pointlessly obscuring camerawork and disjunctive editing, you can barely make out the main characters before Albino Dad is savagely attacked by machete wielding murderers and his wife sends their Albino son off to live with her brother (?) in the big city to eke out a living searching land fills for metals & computer parts.  But even relative safety proves elusive as the boy’s uncle also lives under threat from violent gangs working for loan sharks out to collect what he owes on his truck.  As presented by Deshe, it's less story & character than narrative roadblock.  Too much lost thru over-active camera work and excessive editing of  already confusing raw footage.  The storytelling clears up for the finale after another Albino is killed: vigilante justice, lynching, a chance for personal revenge.  But hasn't the young man seen enough killing?  Ethnographically fascinating; cinematically obscured, the film, meant to be challenging, comes off as wasted opportunity.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  An award-winner for co-writer/director Deshe, ten years on and nothing new yet released.

DIVINE (1935)

Even when busy staying a step ahead of Nazis in the ‘30s (Germany to Italy to France, eventually  Hollywood), director Max Ophüls was unable to stop turning out the occasional masterpiece wherever he was.  His French debut, from Colette’s first original film script, if below that mark, still pretty special.  Ophüls somewhat held back by leading lady Simone Berriau (one good angle getting her thru a mere 14 films) on this standard story of the nice country girl nearly corrupted by the big bad city; worse, showbiz in the big bad city.  Set up as a replacement by a pal who’s going on tour, Simone’s got the looks to stand on stage in an oo-la-la revue and the figure to drop her drape and reveal almost all.  But good country gal that she is, she refuses to bare.  A rebellious act that causes a sensation!  (Don’t worry, you still see plenty that was banned outside France: bare breasts, lesbian tidings, drugs, opium seduction . . . saved in the nick of time by a police raid.  (Here, the one thing that needs to be smuggled past the backstage doorman is a breast-feeding baby.)  Meantime, Simone shuns showbiz temptation, she’d rather take a stroll with that good-natured milkman, George Rigaud in a breakthru perf.  But when circumstantial evidence on drug trafficking at the theater points in her direction, the wages of avoiding sin take their toll.  Ophüls seems completely comfortable right from the start.  And when the sets are too small for his favored long tracking shots (as in a cramped five-room apartment) he fakes a single-shot using an optical printing trick.  Once inside the theater, he can really stretch out and stage edit-free multi-plane action, roaming about while lenser Roger Hubert, nobly working to the limits of capacity, captures it all in one take.   The whole modest package basically irresistible.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Ophüls most famous backstager was his last film, the great LOLA MONTES/’55 which, alas, was also seriously damaged by an inadequate leading lady.

SLOW WEST (2015)

Well-received but largely overlooked, this chamber Western apparently started & stopped writer/director John Maclean’s promising career track.  (No credits in the last eight years, not an atypical real-world fallout after splashy success at Sundance.)  Neatly melding the sort of modest ornery Westerns Budd Boetticher & Randolph Scott were making in the ‘50s with the nihilistic Neo-Noir present-day ‘Westerns’ popping up in the ‘80s (and at a trim 83"), Maclean heads West in 1870's America as Kodi Smit-McPhee’s romantic young naïf pursues Rose, the girl of his dreams who left Scotland before him.  Joined none too soon by Michael Fassbender’s ‘protector’ at a particularly threatening moment as the film begins, he’s unaware the girl he loves (along with her father) has a $2000 reward on her head for murder or that Fassbender is actually a bounty hunter using him to guide him toward her.  Picaresque and picturesque, the film plays out as a series of lethal adventures, deliberately paced & low-key, yet leaving more dead bodies in its wake than the last act of HAMLET.  Mostly very accomplished, it could have filled in more of the girl’s backstory (she comes off as heartless), and Maclean no master of subjective POV, but fitted out with a fine sense of grandeur & absurdity that never feels condescending.  A common problem on those ‘80s noirs.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Never noticed it before, but here Mr. Fassbender is something of a ringer for the young Charlton Heston, if a far more fluid actor.  The face, form, even more the back of the neck.

SHOW BOAT (1936; 1951)

In the popular arts, ‘progressive’ is a relative term.  And so it’s proved to be in the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein 1927 musical breakthru, from Edna Ferber’s multi-generation tale of showbiz & heartache around a theatrical Mississippi riverboat.  You only need to look at how the opening verse of Flo Ziegfeld’s legendary show was altered over the years.  Meant to shock in ‘27, the first thing heard in the show was an all-Black chorus singing: ‘Niggers all work on the Mississippi; Niggers all work while the White folk play.’  (Yikes!  Ziegfeld productions always opened with a chorus line of pretty girls.)  But by the time this 1936 film came out, the verse had changed to: ‘Darkies all work . . . ‘  For the 1946 B’way revival it was ‘Colored folk work . . . ‘, and post mid-‘60s revisions got by with ‘Here we all work . . . ‘  American race attitudes in a nutshell.  And M-G-M in 1951?  They skip the verse entirely.  It’s changes like that in this ultra-lux iteration that turn a once purposefully tough show anodyne.  And while 1936 can be awkward and a little bumpy, it sees director James Whale working out of his fach, but often doing impressive things, generally sticking close to the original script, it's helped rather than hurt by rough moments, with real texture to the thing.  George Sidney in the remake very much in his lane, but unwilling to change gears and break out.  (In different ways, both versions make a mess of the end.)  Of course, 1936 has a dream cast of real SHOW BOAT stage vets: Helen Morgan’s Julie (with her wistful soprano) & Charles Winninger’s Capt. Andy (fighting himself to a draw on stage) from the original cast (so too Sammy White’s Frank & Francis X. Mahoney’s Rubber Face); Paul Robeson’s Joe from London; Irene Dunne who toured extensively as Magnolia.  (What a shame Edna May Oliver, the original Mother Parthy, had just left Universal for M-G-M.)   For 1951, gorgeous Ava Gardner*, Joe E. Brown, William Warfield’s impossibly smooth-voiced Joe in ‘Old Man River’, flutter-prone Kathryn Grayson, all completely outclassed.  Even solid Howard Keel’s riverboat gambler loses to Allan Jones whose voice & lightweight character are a much better fit for weak Gaylord Ravenal.  You get the idea of what’s consistently lost simply by comparing the full Oscar Hammerstein scena he turns out for the 1936 ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’ sequence: lifelong bond between Magnolia & Julie; foreshadow of the miscegenation storyline, startling frank sexuality between Robeson & Hattie McDaniels' Queenie unheard of from a Black couple on screen at the time (with more to come in “I Still Suits Me’ a duet added for the film); Magnolia showing latent talent as a performer (Dunne, nearing 40, twerking!), and Parthy’s intolerance.  While the same song in 1951 delivers nothing but the girl bonding.*  Of course, not everything favors the older film, 1936 does give us Dunne as a ‘pickaninny’ (Four-star BlackFace ALERT!), but most of the missteps you find smoothed over in the 1951 remake are exactly what George Cukor knew to avoid when he made DAVID COPPERFIELD the year before, later saying, he ‘discovered my own rule in doing adaptations.  You must get the essence of the original which may involve accepting some of the weaknesses . . . I don’t believe in ‘correcting’ Dickens, ‘saving’ him and all that. I just had to go with the vitality of the thing.’  That’s what Hammerstein & Whale got so right in this remarkable 1936 document.

DOUBLE-BILL: This double-bill’s self-evident.  But watch the 1936 version first.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *And Ava really is unusually gorgeous lensed by Charles Rosher, though famously unhappy after her own vocals were eventually dubbed by Annette Warren for theaters.  Hers wound up only on the soundtrack album.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Or simply compare and contrast the comic pair of dancers on the show boat in the two films.  These two are meant to be nice second-raters.  Exactly how they are cast in 1936, while 1951 sees Marge & Gower Champions, the top swanky nightclub dance act in the country at the time, their steely perfection (and Gower’s glamor) useless to the story.

TERET / THE LOAD (2018)

Forget those OTT dystopian horror pics (Zombies, Undead, Roadie terrorists in barren scrub land), Yugoslavia 1999 was the real deal, no CGI necessary.  A no-way-out proposition of a country, torn in two by sectarian violence and NATO bombing.  It’s the slice-of-life drama targeted for his feature debut by writer/director Ognjen Glavonic in this deliberately paced, taciturn look at a few local misérables, given its P.O.V. by one bearish middle-aged truck driver transporting a high-priority mystery load he’d prefer not to know anything about.  Working his way from Kosovo to Belgrade around road blocks; stopping at a motel to phone home as an oddly threatening country wedding whirls about him; reluctantly accepting a teenage passenger trying to get out of the country (and forging an unlikely/temporary bond); spending the night at the routing office while his truck is ‘serviced.’  Then it’s back home before more of the same, hopefully a last run, and probably without his wife and rebellious teenage son to return to as they’re off to her father’s to find safety.   Grim and grimy, yet not without notes of grace between the stillness and general suspense, caught in what could be the calm before the storm.  It’s an unsettling place to be and an unsettling film, memorably so.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The way Ognjen Glavonic uses his cast, you might think they’re non-pros pulled off the streets of Belgrade, but all the larger parts taken by actors with lots of credits; the lead Leon Lucev with an impressive 76 titles on IMDb.

THE UNFAITHFUL (1947)

Third time ‘round for Somerset Maugham’s THE LETTER (an Early Talkie with gifted/doomed Jeanne Eagels in 1929 then haute Golden Age Hollywood from William Wyler for Bette Davis in 1940*) updates the property and moves from corrupt exotic Singapore to upperclass Wilshire Boulevard, L.A.  Now, Ann Sheridan’s the unfaithful wife who kills her attacker (or is it her lover?), Zachary Scott the blinkered husband and Lew Ayres the lawyer who’s also a family friend.  (Herbert Marshall played them both: lawyer in ‘29; cuckold in ‘40.)  It works, too, but there’s a structural problem since we’ve left Maugham’s unrepentant ways behind and need to thread a needle of love & redemption.  It means a whole extra act & epilogue (it feels less like a fourth act than like a second third act), and director Vincent Sherman, elsewise near his best, loses his footing in the last two reels.  Still awfully good.  Sheridan, Scott & Ayres habitually underrated actors, and substitutions for the other characters particularly clever (Steven Geray, Jerome Cowan, John Hoyt, Marta Mitrovich), plus Eve Arden cracking wise.  Look fast to spot the famous atrium & exposed elevators of the Bradbury Office Building in one of its first (of 100) screen appearances.  Too bad Warner's official release hasn’t a better print source.  It’s watchable, but does Ernest Haller’s lensing no favors.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Wyler/Davis rightly esteemed (it’s the one that opens as Davis shoots her lover six times on the porch), but Jeanne Eagels, cosseted with a nearly abstract visual approach (it’s easily located online in reasonable prints), is something else again.  Eagels some kind of acting genius, dead within the year from drug addiction.  She didn’t play the role on stage (Katharine Cornell did), but she’s unmatchable, one of the few addicts who seemed to use their addiction as a dramatic tool rather than try to hide behind it.  Like a great operatic diva using rather than obscuring vocal flaws for dramatic potential.

MY FATHER'S DRAGON (2022)

The trend isn’t good for Irish animator Nora Twomey.  After riding a wave of goodwill co-directing THE SECRET OF KELLS/’09 at Cartoon Saloon with Thomm Moore (who wouldn’t root for a small Irish animation outfit taking on Hollywood's giants?*), she went on her own with THE BREADWINNER/’17, both films worthy but underwhelming.  But neither prepares you for this sorrowful hodgepodge, a mess of a fantasy from Ruth Stiles Gannett’s popular mid-20th Century book about Elmer, a positive-thinking lad (presumably in Depression Era America*) who moves to the big impersonal city after Mom loses their small town grocery.  It’s tough going in the city, but luckily a stray cat starts speaking!  But only to Elmer.  And this leads to further adventures out at sea, landing on a wild island populated entirely by animals and run by apes in various sizes along with a magical dragon who needs a confidence boost that only Elmer is able to provide.  Some of the animation is fun to look at, the flat graphics of the prologue has a certain picturebook charm to it, but the fantasy elements don’t line up in a memorable way while the All-Star vocal cast proves surprisingly distracting.  NetFlix apparently kept this one strictly as a streamer so no idea if it caught on or not.  Maybe it just worked better on the page.  Gannett did write two sequels.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Of the Cartoon Saloon releases, Thomm Moore’s SONG OF THE SEA/’14 is the most satisfying.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/06/song-of-sea-2014.html    LINKs for Twomey’s other films:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/02/secret-of-kells-2009.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/th-breadwinner-2017.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The period is left vague, but still odd to notice over-the-shoulder seat belts when Mom & Son drive into town.

BLACKBERRY (2023)

Between BLACKBERRY smartphones, AIR’s footwear, and TETRIS computer games, late 20th century consumerism is getting quite the workout in 2023.  This one, a fact-based tale of Canadian hubris (is that an oxymoron?) plays as a satirical cautionary: All Capitalism Tends to Corrupt/Absolute Capitalism Corrupts Absolutely.  A pair of likeable tech nerds hope to land a deal to finance their putative smartphone, but only get up and running when a hard-charging, just fired master-of-the-universe wannabe businessman comes on board and totally shakes up their sleepy operation.  A series of compromises, moral & technical, do wonders for a few years, but over-extension, cutthroat deals, financial promises & lies, and character flaws magnified in the heat of competition bring it crashing down.  Director/co-writer Matt Johnson has a good time (maybe a better time than you’ll have, the film was an unexpected flop in Canada and a non-starter Stateside*) digitally shooting in a fashion made to resemble a 16mm cinema verité crew mistakenly hired for a mockumentary tv sit-com like THE OFFICE.  A perfect fit for both the film’s time frame and for the spirit of a little company growing too big for its britches.  Though with a Canadian film you never can be sure if it was done on purpose or was serendipitous.  In either case it’s the best observation in here, other than a superb character touch right at the end, when our nerd prince realizes he’s turned back into a frog as he opens the newly arrived Chinese manufactured model meant to save the company, then carefully repacks the substandard item neatly back in its box.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above, AIR (not seen here) and/or TETRIS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/04/tetris-2023.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Jay Baruchel, who plays the top tech nerd destroyed by success is like a new generation Rick Moranis.  Hopefully he won’t pull a disappearing act before turning 50.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Unusually, not a single mention of family or homelife for anyone in here.  Outside works interests reduced to Movie Night (at the office) and Hockey.  There are exactly three very modest female speaking roles and no relationship/romantic angle at all.  Does this in any way explain the financial drubbing?