MIRACLES FOR SALE (1939)

Best known for Creep-Out/Horror silents with Lon Chaney*; Bela Lugosi’s atmospheric but hopelessly stiff DRACULA/’31; and that sui generis circus-world oddity FREAKS/’32, director Tod Browning proved unwilling to adjust his silent technique to fit modern synch-sound Hollywood.  (Not unable, unwilling.)  Only coming to terms with the inevitable on THE DEVIL-DOLL/’36 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/12/devil-doll-1936.html), his last assignment before a final return three years on for this toss-away M-G-M programmer (not that studio’s strong-suit).  And it’s surprising good fun, a sort of magician’s shaggy dog story about ex-illusionist Robert Young, now a magic act salesman & psychic debunker, trying to help desperate Florence Rice fight off a phony spiritualist (her secret sister) who’s gotten involved in some very real murders.  Continuity and editing still a bit bumpy, and you won’t be able to figure out all the explanations, but the zip of magic tricks added to a nutty police procedural makes for good spritely stuff if you turn off the left side of your brain.  Plus, snazzy lensing in an early outing from the excellent Charles Lawton Jr., later a fave of John Ford, Budd Boetticher & others for decades.  Why Browning never got another shot after this more mysterious than anything in the plot.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Try THE UNKNOWN/’27; or perhaps THE SHOW/’27 which anticipates FREAKS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-unknown-1927-mystic-1925.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-show.html

INTENT TO KILL (1958)

Celebrated British cinematographer Jack Cardiff added a second shingle to his skill set when he directed this dandy hospital thriller.  (Desmond Dickinson D.P.’d)  Jimmy Sangster took a break from Hammer Film monsters to adapt Brian Moore’s novel about a Leftist South American leader (Herbert Lom) undergoing brain surgery incognito in Montreal.  (A running joke has everyone diss Canada: too cold, too dull, too far away from everything.)  Richard Todd & Alexander Knox are the surgeons who drill into Lom’s brain hoping to stop seizures before political rivals take advantage.  But a hired team of assassins, already on to the ruse, plan to make murder look like a natural occurrence.  So, no guns, no poison, no strangulation; instead, a stealth needle loaded with pockets of air ready for injection.  Two wild cards in play: a lack of security at the hospital to maintain Lom’s incognito status; and too much sex among the principals.  Hey, gotta give the women something to do!  Even Betsy Drake*, the one female doctor in the story wants to be involved with Dr. Todd while his wife is openly sleeping around; the dictator’s wife entangled with his chargé d'affaires; and one of the assassins hooking up with a hotel hooker.  All this neatly laid out for us structurally, plus a great bit at the climax that sees Drake & Todd getting all lovey-dovey while seated on the hospital’s emergency staircase unaware they’re blocking one of the assassins from sneaking up to the third floor.  (It’s the Parcheesi Gambit!)  Cardiff would soon peak as director with D.H. Lawrence’s SONS AND LOVERS/’60 before going back largely to superior lensing, but this was an excellent start to his side gig.

DUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Can it be a coincidence?  Betsy Drake, weakest link in the pic, was still married to Cary Grant when this was made, and already Mrs. Grant when he made CRISIS/’50 with Richard Brooks which plays with similar dramatic elements.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/crisis-1950.html

OAMENI DE TREABA / MEN OF DEEDS (2022)

From Romanian director Paul Negoescu, a cautionary tale that pivots from countryside corruption & comic incompetence to real casualties; Gogol drollery to Grand Guignol.  Iulian Postelnicu, in an award-winner perf, is the small town chief of police (well, he’s got one assistant) hoping to buy a local orchard with cash raised from a flat he co-owns in Bucharest with his siblings.  But first, the town mayor (who along with the local priest are a formidable tag team of self-interest) needs a favor.  Seems the husband of the prettiest wife in town has met with an ‘accident.’  Worse, that newly hired junior cop has taken it upon himself to investigate before the proper authorities come up with the ‘truth.’   (And BTW: here’s the deed to that orchard you asked about.)  A fine sick joke lets us know the Mayor had, years back, stolen the property from the family that built it up.  In the first half, Negoescu gives this a mordant, yet still comic edge.  But once the junior cop is beaten to within an inch of his life for being honest, all the laughs stick in your throat as backtracking & coverups take over, personal limits of conduct are broached, and the price of doing business in a one boss town turns deadly.  Exceptionally brought off, with clear as a bell staging (often from a little further back than you expect) and no one but one lucky chicken, who opens the film getting bumped out of a truck before deciding to cross the road, none the worse for wear.

ATTENTION MUST B PAID:  No doubt there’s some political allegory going on that will largely escape non-Romanians.  But the film works perfectly well without such knowledge.  (And note how our poster sticks to a comedy angle.)

GODLAND / VANSKABTE LAND (2022)

From Denmark and Iceland, an award-winning historical, severe in character, storyline & execution.*  It’s late-1800s when young, untested Priest Elliot Crosset Hove is assigned to build a church before winter sets in at a small Danish community under development in Iceland.  Writer/director Hlynur Pálmason gives his game away from the start, introducing the priest as the sort who ignores the fine meal his superior has put on the table to unblinkingly stare with the eyes of a zealot as he receives his special commission.  A difficult trip to the site loses a man to wild river currents, while unceasing daylight & strangely unsettling/beautiful terrain uplifts & weighs down on them in equal measure; except for the local guide whose Icelandic tongue keeps him grounded to the land but at a certain distance.  So, it’s a shock to finally reach the not unpleasant homestead community and be welcomed by a widower with two girls in comfortable conditions, then asked why he didn’t just sail directly to port.  Was his journey a test?  Something to do with the photographic equipment he’s been diligently carting with him?  And once there, this chilly addition to the little group turns covetous of accommodations, horses, the farmer’s older daughter; and begatter of distrust (him and the widower; him and the guide; him and his own neglected duties).  The film disquieting and, frankly, dislikable.  It all ends badly with violent secrets leading to murders of man and beast.  I suppose you could call it uncompromising; it’s certainly no ad for Danish Lutherism.  Yikes!  Here looking much like Calvinist denial, dressed up with those finicky white neck collars.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Severe enough to be shot on 35mm stock in ‘Academy Ratio’ (1.33 : 1), particularly helpful in mountainous settings where compositions lean toward the vertical.  And in a film calling for many full-face close-ups, proportionally 1.33 : 1.

SONG OF RUSSIA (1944)

Under pressure from Washington to orchestrate sympathetic views of Soviet Russia, now part of WWII Allied Forces, it wasn’t long before Hollywood had to plead for remorse as post-War Commie Witch Hunts gathered steam and HUAC came a’knockin’.  The usual poster boys for such political flip-floppery?  Sam Goldwyn’s Once Upon a Russian Steppe in THE NORTH STAR/’43 (later reedited as ARMORED ATTACK/’56 with military atrocities turned non-partisan) and Warner Bros.’ quasi-journalistic MISSION TO MOSCOW/’43.  These prestige releases gaining Seven Oscar noms between them.  Yet this justly forgotten  M-G-M effort makes them look Neo-Realistic by comparison.  Celebrity conductor Robert Taylor, waving his arms instead of the flag, making this just before war service, falls for pretty proletarian Jean Peters, busy rattling off Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto when she’s not hitting the tractor back on the farm.  Taylor, instantly smitten, spends the first hour & change touring the wonders of the last 5-Year Plan with her (nightclubs; subways; crop yields - the last two courtesy of badly matched stock footage) before Russian Orthodox marriage & concertizing stopped by that pesky Nazi invasion.  Stay & fight or publicize the cause at Symphony Halls around the world?  Best moment?  Taylor, finding father-in-law at bombed out homestead, covers the corpse with his Burberry overcoat; the ultimate sacrifice.  None of this too surprising if you recall that Taylor was already in line to win the booby prize on these glossy war mellers after rescuing Norma Shearer from a Concentration Camp in ESCAPE/’40.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  You’re only a click away from the HUAC horrors mentioned above.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/mission-to-moscow-1944.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-north-star-1943.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Something of a cursed cast here with all our top-billed players dying young.  Chain-smoking Taylor and his chain-drinking manager Robert Benchley gone at 57 & 56.  While Peter’s dad John Hodiak’s bad heart kept him out of the war, it also killed him, only 41.  Peters saddest of all, paralyzed in a hunting accident, gone at 31.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Least talented of the major studio contract composers, Herbert Stothart was also the most classically inclined to steal from the masters.  So, imagine how he makes hay with a score that openly credits Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky for about 90% of diegetic and background music.  Much is rhythmically altered and faintly embarrassing, but not the women farm workers when they sing a chorus from Eugene Onegin.  Works like a charm.

SPA NIGHT (2016)

Well-intentioned, well-observed, well-received, but modest to a fault debut of writer/director Andrew Ahn.  Semi-autobiographical?  It reeks of a film-school graduation short stretched to meet entry qualifications on the fest-circuit.  A character piece, it follows a Korean family of three, stuck in lives of quiet desperation in L.A. after their Mom & Pop Korean restaurant goes bust.  Mom quickly lands a job at another place, thanks to a Church connection, but Dad’s one-off gigs grow sparse and he starts to drink.  Meanwhile the 18-yr-old son (alter-ego/heart of the film) visits a former church pal, now at USC, for a taste of college life.  Out of his inner-world routine (running & SAT prep), he may be the tallest Korean around (two generations taller than his folks), but he comes up short socially with these immature college habitués.  More important, coming up short at that pricey SAT prep course, he takes a part-time job at a Korean Spa where he zones out doing menial tasks and tries to subdue an interest in the non-Korean gay pickups going on.  All this neatly done, if perhaps missing a bit of needed teen grit, mess & angst.  Along with a lack of resolution that’s meant to ring true, but feels more like avoidance.  Still, interesting for the L.A. Korean Community background and social networking.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Admittedly, not really on point, but for a warm/poignant family drama (elderly father, the well-off son who left home; mentally challenged brother) running a beat up Public Spa in China, Yang Zhang’s XI ZAO / SHOWER/’99 is a real find.

WIND RIVER (2017)

Excluding what seems a false start (VILE/’11 - not seen here), current go-to Man of the West Taylor Sheridan made his directing debut, from his own script, on this Modern Western/Police Procedural.  No one’s trying to reinvent the wheel on this one, which turns out to be a good thing, indeed, Sheridan’s shooting style so straightforward, you might have a moment’s confusion when he cuts directly into the film’s big ‘reveal’ flashback.  Storytelling worked out more thru character, climate & landscape/less thru plot & action.  (Who knew Budd Boetticher was doing posthumous mentoring?)  Jeremy Renner is solid & reserved as the wildlife agent in & around Indian Territory Wyoming pulled from predator control to aid unseasoned FBI agent Elizabeth Olsen, unversed in the customs of the county as she tracks down the killer of an 18-yr-old Native American who froze to death running for her life in the snow-covered mountains.  It’s a case with personal echoes for Renner along with tricky borders that cross Reservation, State, and Federal control.  Good, clean investigation in a tough to handle setting; Olsen talented but unprepared to take charge.  Yet what’s most interesting about Sheridan’s work isn’t what he does dramatically, but what he avoids.  No romance bubbling up between the leads; no simmering tensions with Renner’s young son when he has to work on this murder (Renner separated from his Native American wife); no wildlife revenge from that unkilled mountain lion who could have ironically settled scores.  A bit of forced melodrama that must have been particularly tempting to add in.  Many more smart moves . . . or rather smart denials of easy payback & twists.  Not that we don’t get a big, traditional shootout finale.  A film that gets its drama, its emphases and its logistics right.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Similar crime territory (literally territory, crossing in & out of Indian Reservation Lands) nicely handled in streaming series LONGMIRE (2012 - ‘17).  Or is when the show sticks to cases and goes easy on interpersonal complications.  (Graham Green in both, but in LONGMIRE he's a baddie.)

SIN / IL PECCATO (2019)

Andrey Konchalovskiy’s messy bio-pic on Renaissance master Michelangelo Buonarroti is less THE Anti-AGONY AND THE ECSTACY/’65 than contrary view/continuation.*  Dirty and scrubby, it largely picks up the story where the earlier film stopped: finishing the Sistine Chapel and the death of Pope Julius II.  Here, drama comes as a tale of two cities (Florence & the Vatican in Rome); two powerhouse families (Medici & Della Rovere); even two marble quarries.  Not much noble on view in this Michelangelo, a scruffy, unwashed fellow (Alberto Testone’s peasant face not far off the Michelangelo portraits he snuck into his famous frescos*), whereas Charlton Heston in the earlier film more fit as a subject for sculpting than self-portrait.  Tiresome at times with unvaried ranting & raving from Michelangelo; when does he work?  But his obvious genius, accepted, understood, fully appreciated even then, is grudgingly indulged by his patrons.  (At times a scorecard might help keep track of principals, projects & locations.)  Was he really this impossible?  But Konchalovskiy, who was partner/co-scripter on that greatest of all artist bio-pics, ANDREI RUBLEV/’66, knows when he has to deliver and damned if he doesn’t find an analogous set piece to RUBLEV’s overwhelming Casting of the Bell finale.  Here, it’s at the end of the second act, a quarry extraction of a mighty block of pure white marble.  This remarkable sequence feels like we’ve entered a time machine and are watching the event happen.  Period techniques, real weight, real danger; a gobsmacking full reel of material (in Academy Ratio, BTW) that makes up for many patchy moments elsewhere.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *That big, clunky, unexpectedly entertaining ‘60s bio-pic on same: THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY.  Put together with this, you might even find something of the man.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/agony-and-ecstasy-1965.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Amusingly, and it’s the only amusing thing in the pic, from some angles, Testone’s Michelangelo looks a lot like Hugh Griffith in his role as Sheik Ilderim in BEN-HUR/’59 which he played opposite Chuck Heston.

BACKLASH (1947)

Dozens of films & tv episodes use BACKLASH in the title.  Yet, having seen but one other (BACKLASH/’56 - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/01/backlash-1956.html), I can still comfortably say this is the worst of all BACKLASHes.*  Poor 20th/Fox Exec Sol M. Wurtzel, long-time head of B-pics, no longer able to count on MR. MOTO films or CHARLIE CHAN to keep his unit profitable.  Now, forced to make-or-break on every release, always starting from scratch.  Sure enough, Wurtzel was on his last legs.  Only in his 50s, he’d be out of the biz in two years after nearly 200 film credits.  This one a substandard film noir about a murdered defense attorney with a former killer-client at large; a young wife with insurance to claim upon his death; and a D.A. already involved with the straying wife.  Plenty of suspects for the beetle-browed detective on the case, along with his comic-relief Italian partner.  (He puts the make on every secretary with a bit of Italian verse.  Maybe it played better in ‘47 . . . nah.)  Journeyman hack Eugene Forde, a regular CHARLIE CHAN megger, can’t find a single interesting angle or a spark of originality in his cast of also-rans and serial players.  Blah would be putting it mildly.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: I’m sure Forde has better CHARLIE CHANs to watch, but who can keep them straight?  On the other hand, seven of the eight MR. MOTOs are top-notch programmers, the good ones all directed by Norman Foster, and produced, of course, by Sol Wurtzel.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/thank-you-mr-moto-1938.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Not so fast, a few of those BACKLASH titles come from WWF/WWE tv specials which are probably worse than this film.  Too bad no kitchen-sink dramas, suggested title: BACKSPLASH.