flash reviews of twenty-two films
Actually I ended this after only three weeks. Perhaps I am watching too many old movies, but I have little taste for most newer ones. The selection here is not necessarily representative, though it does include some of the genres to which I regularly return: noir, old comedies, silents.
On Approval
On Approval,
a 1944 British comedy based on Fredric Lonsdale’s play, is a most enjoyable
farce, something like watered-down Oscar Wilde.
Written, produced, and Directed by Clive Brooks, who also does a grand
job portraying the cynical and witty Duke of Bristol. The cast also includes Googie Withers,
Beatrice Lillie, and Roland Culver, and the two couples attract and repel each
other in the most satisfyingly symmetrical way.
The opening sequence, in a documentary style, jokes about WWI, in a way one would have thought scarcely possible
during WWII, and the closing fantasy, in which photographs of the characters
become animated, are unusually clever.
Genuine
Everyone loves
Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but his other films are also
strong Expressionist works. Though the
original subtitle was Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses (Tragedy of a
Strange House), the film was also released as Genuine: A Tale of a
Vampire, in spite of the fact that Genuine is not really a vampire. Portrayed by Fern Andra, she is a marvelously
feral woman, snapping like a beast, yet fascinating men. The primary appeal of Genuine (1920)
is certainly Cesar Klein’s wonderfully weird sets, representing a world of the
imagination.
The Secret Window
David Koepp’s
2004 The Secret Window, based on a Stephen King story with a score
in part by Philip Glass, is the sort of
thriller one might enjoy the first time through, but which few would care to
see again. Johnny Depp’s rumpled nerves
as the main character and John Turturro’s fierce understated menace as his
antagonist are creditable, but there are continuity problems. Why did the neighbor first say he saw a
stranger, and then that he didn’t if Shooter never existed? Why does the dog exit, and we don’t ever see
Mort follow him until he goes out to discover the animal’s body. The issue of the conclusion of the story,
with the alteration to killing the wife, and the revelation that Shooter means
“shoot her” are one-time surprises at best.
Clues that the makers may not have felt the story quite held together
might be inferred from the facts that the film has an ending different from the
print story and that still another variation is on the home video version.
Theodora Goes Wild
This 1936
screwball comedy directed by Richard Boleslawski delivers the requisite laughs
and mild social satire of its genre with Irene Dunne as a sheltered small-town resident
living with her conservative maiden aunts who is somehow the pseudonymous
author of a best-selling racy novel. Her
sophistication is challenged by Melvyn Douglas, her publisher’s illustrator, who
promptly makes her drunk and invites her to his apartment from which she
flees. The light play with impropriety
continues when he follows her to her village and manages (in an unlikely turn of
events) to become a gardener as well as later, when she returns to town holding
a baby some assume to be hers. It is all
light and fluffy, if implausible. The
director, an émigré artist, had been a pioneering teacher of Stanislavski’s methods, and Orson Welles wrote
and directed a radio version, also starring Dunne, for his Mercury Playhouse in
1940.
The Garden of Allah
Directed (like Theodora
Goes Wild) by Boleslawski, this 1936 film derives its charm in part from the exotic desert landscapes – this
was only the third film made using the Technicolor process – and in part from the acting of Charles Boyer
and Marlene Dietrich. Boyer is painfully
anxious, silent, and troubled as a monk who has run away from his monastery in
North Africa in search of love with Dietrich, whose role here is
uncharacteristically moral and thoughtful.
Contemporary viewers will probably be surprised at the horror with which
she regards his abandonment of his vocation, and might be distressed rather
than impressed, at his leaving his beloved to return to the Trappists. (Anyone who accepts the Mother Superior
advising Dietrich to venture out into the sands to settle her soul will find
that it is all providential.) This piety
coexists with John Carradine’s turn as a presumably Islamic diviner whose role,
like that of the title, is to emphasize the story’s exciting foreignness.
By Candlelight
Director James
Whale showed equal talent at sophisticated comedy as he did at the horror genre
for which he is best known. This 1933
film By Candlelight, adapted from Siegfried Geyer’s play by P. G.
Wodehouse, is an outstanding example.
With farce elements of mistaken identities and people shunted into back
rooms just as a jealous husband is about to appear, the story is consistently
amusing, and it delivers on the
“pre-Code” label with frequent double entendres and suggestive details
such as when the butler adds a pillow to the bed when he expects his employer
to be entertaining a lady. Even though
the plot’s parallelism is transparent early on – the butler is pretending to be
a prince and the maid to be a countess -- its unfolding is consistently
entertaining.
Desert Fury
Lewis Allen’s
1947 Desert Fury has a familiar plot-line: the vulnerable young woman is
rescued from a relationship with a criminal by the hero. The bad guy dies and the couple glides off
into a happy future. This basic
narrative is enriched and complicated by several striking elements. Luminous, almost garish, Technicolor photography by Edwad Cronjager and
Chales Lang is accompanied by a similarly sumptuous score by Miklós
Rózsa
that moves from heart-stopping excitement to romantic violins, to bouncy
Western themes. What has attracted most
recent notice is the clear implication of a gay relationship between the
characters of John Hodiak and Wendell Corey.
Though treated as a minion by his intimate friend, the latter is
fiercely jealous after Lizabeth Scott’s appearance as a rival love object. Further, Mary Astor is represented as wishing
to be her daughter’s “friend” or “sister,” taking all responsibility while
shielding the younger woman from the male betrayal she had herself experienced.
The late forties was the boom-time for quasi-Freudian psychological elements in
movies, and plenty here invites analysis as the characters trade suggestive
remarks and slap each around. Burt
Lancaster, meanwhile, is the straightest one around, if the hypermasculinity of
his role as cop as well as cowboy and rodeo rider can be considered
normal.
The Magic Christian
Joseph McGrath’s 1969 film The Magic
Christian never holds together, in spite of the considerable talent that
went into it. The director had worked on
the Goon Show and writer Terry Southern and star Peter Sellers had been
in part responsible for the memorable Dr. Strangelove. Here they are joined by Ringo Starr (who
walks through his part passively as though the mere glow of Beatles fame is
sufficient), John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Raquel Welch, Spike Milligan,
Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Roman Polanski. Yul Brynner does a drag number, and the
film’s theme is composed by Paul McCartney.
Yet still it doesn’t work. Randomness
can be effective, when incoherence itself is a meaningful stylistic choice, but
it here becomes tiresome, especially since the one joke – that people will do
anything for money – is repeated far too often.
The scene in which greedy and
well-dressed men wallow in gore and excrement to grab a few banknotes is
vitiated by the fact that it simply underlines what has been conveyed multiple
times before. More than anything else,
perhaps, I was amused by Sellers’ vocal modulations at certain moments. McGrath had worked on Hard Day’s Night
and Help as well as on the Beatles’ videos featuring a number of their
hits. Simple high spirits and chaos
served just fine for those productions, but a feature film requires something
more.
Destiny
Fritz Lang’s Destiny,
originally titled Der Müde Tod, is a fantasy in which a young women contends with death in an
attempt to reclaim her lover, in the course of which three stories of tragic
love and death set in exotic locales are related. Here the art direction is less significant than in Genuine or
Caligari, though the Near Eastern and the Chinese towns are represented
with more attention to the charm of the
strange than to authenticity. The
principal story is simple enough, and its conclusion in which the lovers are
reunited but only in death, is familiar.
The three internal stories are likewise elementary – in each case
outsiders aligned with the powers that be frustrate and ultimately bring to a
violent end the lovers’ relationship. The
chief appeal of the film as a whole is simply its joyous embrace of the
cinematic possibilities: flitting among historical eras and around the globe
with scenes enhanced by special effects
such as double exposures and A Hi’s flying carpet. Bernhard Goetzke’s somber performance as Death
is more sympathetic than most (He asks, ”Why do people hate me simply for doing
God’s will?”), though in general highly conventional, and I was surprised to
learn that Lang credited his storyline not only to the Indian tale of Savitri,
but more intimately to childhood dreams and visions of his own.
Inside Llewyn Davis
I have no idea why
both the BBC and the New York Times feature this film on their lists of
the best movies since the turn of the last century. Though I am a fan of Dave Von Ronk and an
observer if the early ‘sixties folk scene, this unpleasant and shapeless story
seems to me to convey very little of either.
The assault (apparently based on a true incident) has no clear meaning
in relation to the period, yet it is shown twice (somewhat confusingly). Davis is alternately explosively nasty and
quietly brooding. Jean accuses him of
caring more about the lost cat than about her, but I, for one, did, the
same. I guess it would be inappropriate
to expect the Coens to represent the social warmth and idealistic politics of
the period.
Ménilmontant
Named by Pauline
Kael as her favorite film of all time, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 Ménilmontant’s
lack of intertitles signifies the director’s dedication to purely visual
cinematic values. The montages,
hand-held sequences, and double exposures are striking and, for the most part,
effective. Kirsanoff was originally Russian
and surely owed much to Eisenstein (though he claimed to be self-taught), but
he is innovative as well. This film was
his second. He made three features and two
shorts during the silent era and one feature with sound (including music by Arthur
Honegger and Arthur Hoérée, but never thereafter exercised creative
control. Every cinemaphile should watch this
thirty-eight minutes of intense visual code.
You're Telling Me!
Though not one of
Fields’ best films (among which I would count The Fatal Glass of Beer, The
Barber Shop, The Pharmacist, International House, and
anything with Mae West), You're Telling Me! (1934) is nonetheless
consistently entertaining. With Fields
the whole point is his routines which he repeatedly reused and, unlike most
comedians, copyrighted. If he goes on a
bit long, the viewer knows another routine will soon follow. As usual, this film finds Fields in a
small-minded burg, with plenty of gossipy ladies on his case and, here, a few
ne’er-do-well male friends. We expect
character types, not realism, in this sort of comedy and he is disreputable, his
long-suffering wife is censorious, and his daughter’s prospective mother-in-law
snooty, all contributing to the background for his shtick. The young lovers, as in Marx brothers plots
(or, for that matter, most of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales), do little
more than create pauses between the scenes that his audience came to see.
Fading Gigolo
The viewer
wonders if John Turturro’s 2013 comedy, featuring himself and Woody Allen in
the leads, is having a bit of fun with itself.
Turturro is not the most obviously sexy of movie stars, and the plot is
packed with implausibilities. How likely
is a dermatologist to ask her patient, a down-at-heels book dealer, if he might
be able to arrange a ménage-a-trois for her?
Why does Vanessa Paradis’ Satmar character suddenly accept her suitor
who had complained that she was avoiding him?
Does the rabbinical court think she’s in good standing after she says
she is lonely? What is Jade Dixon’s
character doing in the story at all, except to highlight the mixture of Hasidic
and Black in Williamsburg? What will
become of Murray when his shop has closed?
The film’s main charm is Turturro and Allen together.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
In 1927 F. W.
Murnau, the German director best known for Nosferatu, was invited to
Hollywood by William Fox where he made this melodrama. The film was in several ways innovative. Made just prior to the sound era, it used the
Movietone sound-on-film process to include a sound track and a few other sounds. (One hears at one point Gounod's composition Funeral
March of a Marionette, later adopted by the Alfred Hitchcock television show.) Intertitles are sparingly used, and the
camera work is striking, with long tracking shots and creative use of
superimposed images. The sets are
fanciful and the film is worth watching to see the dizzying city and the amusement
park scenes. Oddly, Murnau seems to have
thought himself still in Europe: the unnamed couple at the center of the story
have a home with a thatched roof and, at one point, an orchestra conductor
tells his musicians to play “a peasant dance” whereupon the man and his wife
proceed to do what looks like a mélange of Central European and Russian
moves. Sunrise reminds the
twenty-first century viewer of the days when cinema was young and often more
cinematic and more purely visual than it
is today.
A 1941 comedy directed
by Alexnder Hall, a productive contract director for Columbia for years, Bedtime
Story features Fredric March as a zany playwright who schemes to keep his
wife , played by an elegant Loretta Young, while refusing to leave the theater. It is a well-done if fairly routine piece of
work. A highlight for me was Robert
Benchley’s performance as a sort of pal and casting director for March’s
character, though Helen Westley (who had in fact been an outstanding actor,
active in the Washington Square Players
and the Theatre Guild) was also quite amusing.
The mad accumulating scene toward the end in which March’s rival’s
apartment is filled with crowds of people, among them servers, repair and
exterminating service workers, and drunken conventioneers. When the security staff shows up, the place
erupts in a free-for-all. I was reminded
of the stateroom sequence in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera,
which had been released six years earlier.
Scarlet Street
Fritz Lang’s 1945
film had a similar plot and starred the same actors as his 1944 The Woman in
the Window: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea. The story, about a mousey cashier who is
enthralled by a hard-hearted woman, recalls as well The Blue Angel and Of
Human Bondage. There are several
convention-bending twists at the end that might surprise a first-time viewer,
and the conclusion is so bleak with the murderer never apprehended to boot – that
the film was banned in Milwaukee, Atlanta, and New York State. Duryea, like Richard Widmark, exceled at
playing lowlifes, and he is thoroughly despicable here, while Joan Bennett
underplays for the most part, and Robinson is so very passive as to almost lose
the viewer’s interest. Curious canvases representing
his character’s Sunday paintings present an odd notion of what might have
intrigued the art world at the time. They
had been made by Hollywood artist John Decker, whose other works include
representations of W. C. Fields as Queen Victoria and Blue Boy with the
face of Harpo Marx.
Human Desire
Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (1954) is
certainly watchable, if only for Gloria Grahame’s wounded, pouty performance as Vicki Buckley. The theatrical poster declared, in lettering
larger than the film’s title “She was born to be bad . . . to be kissed . . .
to make trouble.” And so she does in
this version of Zola's novel La Bête humaine. Glenn Ford’s character Jeff Warren, a
recently returned Korean War veteran portrayed as an ordinary worker (he says
his dream, apart from his work, is to do a lot of fishing who generally seems a
nice guy. Thus the viewer may be
surprised when he more or less readily agrees to knock off her husband, his
co-worker. In Zola’s hands, and in the
first two films of the story, the character suffers from hereditary madness and
is seized by violent outbursts victimizing women, and the plot made a bit more
sense. There is considerable footage that
will engage railroad buffs, but cinephiles would do better to see the Jean
Renoir’s 1938 film La Bête Humaine with Jean Gabin.
Goin’ to Town
Originally titled
Now I’m a Lady, a title to which the Hays Office objected, Goin’ to
Town (1935) was directed by Alexander Hall but the film’s genius is its
star and screenplay writer Mae West. The
jokes were sufficiently suggestive that the censors found plenty in the
dialogue and even the songs to complain about.
(Of course, West commented in a late interview with Dick Cavett that she
would sometimes include bits she knew would be cut in order to satisfy the
moral authorities so they would allow her to retain the lines she really wanted
to keep.) Fans of Mae West will enjoy
her sinuous postures and double entendres, as well as several bluesy songs
by Sam Fain and Irving Kahal. She even sings a bit of Saint-Saëns’ Samson
and Delilah! Her dedicated pursuit
of an English Earl, for true love yet, and her social climbing may seem a bit dissonant
with her usual character, but who cares about the plot? The original New York Times review
found her to be past her prime here, but Goin’ to Town remains
thoroughly entertaining with plenty of good one-liners, even if some may be slightly
shopworn.
Cry of the Hunted
Critics refer to veteran
B-picture director Joseph H. Lewis’s 1953 Cry of the Hunted as a noir,
though it is better described as a chase drama. Not only is it set for the most part in
Louisiana bayous which hold menaces far different from those of urban back
alleys -- alligators, disease-inducing water, and even a pit of deadly
quicksand – but its criminal is a sweet guy (though his wife is less
principled). Virtuoso actor Vittorio
Gassman plays a fugitive and Barry Sullivan his pursuer (oddly, not a cop but a
prison administrator). Much recent
reception of the film has focused on the homoerotic implications of the two,
who are repeatedly generous to each other and end up buddies. Even when they are grappling, it looks like
horseplay. Sullivan’s character has a weird dream that the
psychoanalytically inclined might view in this light; at any rate, it makes
little sense otherwise.
Three Weird Sisters
This 1948 drama, directed by Daniel Birt,
attracted my attention when I saw that Dylan Thomas was a co-screenwriter, a
job that he might have regarded as hackwork but which produced an atmospheric
film with a surprising storyline. The
sisters, played by Nancy Price, Mary Clare, Mary Merrall, are indeed weird as
decayed aristocrats in a Welsh mining village (the setting is surely what
suggested Thomas to the producers). The
ladies seem merely superannuated vestiges of the past until their sense of honorable
noblesse oblige leads them to try to murder their brother in a town in
which they command such respect that no
one will believe them capable of such villainy until their third or fourth
attempt. This was Birt’s first feature
and the final appearance of a still-young veteran of two Hitchcock films with a
redoubtable name, Nova Pilbeam.
The Trouble with Harry
This Hitchcock
rarity, a true comedy, indicates that the master was wise when he returned to thrillers,
yet this film is not without its appeal.
A consistent tension is here, with
the contrast between the oh-so-ordinary, here signified by a small
Vermont village, and its residents, who turn out to be rather surprising once
one gets acquainted. For one thing, they
all are very blasé about the appearance of a corpse and little concerned about
informing the authorities, though each might be implicated in the man’s
death. Shirley MacLaine in her film
debut is especially entertaining with her light insouciance, though Edmund
Gwenn (who had played Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street)
also excels in keeping it frothy and just slightly absurd as the retired
captain. However, the spirits prove a
bit thin in the end, and the humor is insufficient to maintain the story’s
length. Nonetheless, the difficulties
are all resolved and there are, not one, but two, marriages in view at the
end. (Do not miss the Saul Steinberg
drawing with the opening credits.)
Lonelyhearts
Vincent J. Donehue’s 1958 Lonelyhearts,
based on Nathanael Wests’ Miss Lonelyhearts, starred Montgomery Clift, Robert Ryan and Myrna Loy. A principal pleasure of the film is watching
Montgomery Clift’s discomfiture at life.
Though at first he feels too much empathy for his correspondents, an
unfortunate encounter leads him to a more despairing cynicism, and through it
all he grimaces and looks pained. All
the Angst of the 1950s teenage youth earlier defined by Marlon Brando
and James Dean is here painfully reiterated.
Like Johnny in The Wild One and Jim Stark in Robel Without a
Cause, Clift’s Adam White feels the pain
of not fitting in. Robert Ryan is
chilling as the cool, utterly amoral manipulative boss who sets out to destroy the
young writer’s illusions (but who seem to soften at the very end).
