Last Update -  January 29, 2012

• The Ides of March (2011 – George Clooney) mixed (DVD)
• Routine Pleasures (1986 – Jean-Pierre Gorin) pro (DVD)
  
• More Than a Miracle (1967 – Francesco Rosi) mixed (cable)
• The Exile (1947 – Max Ophuls) pro (cable)
• Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922 – Benjamin Christensen) pro (cable)
• Poto and Cabengo (1980 – Jean-Pierre Gorin) pro (DVD)
• The Anderson Tapes (1971 – Sidney Lumet) pro(-) (cable)
• Joan of Paris (1942 – Robert Stevenson) mixed(+) (cable)
• Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011 – Rupert Wyatt) pro (DVD)
• The Reluctant Debutante (1958 – Vincente Minnelli) pro(-) (cable)
• Revenge (1964 – Tadashi Imai) pro (DVD)
• Black Girl (1972 – Ossie Davis) pro (cable)
• Rapture (1965 – John Guillermin) pro(-) (on-line)
• Travels With My Aunt (1972 – George Cukor) mixed(+) (cable)
• Paranoiac (1963 – Freddie Francis) pro (on-line)
• Way Down East (1920 – D.W. Griffith) pro (Blu-Ray)
• War Horse (2011 – Steven Spielberg) mixed(+) (Theater)
• Certified Copy (2010 – Abbas Kiarostami) pro(+) (DVD)
• Sons and Lovers (1960 – Jack Cardiff) pro(-) (on-line)

I thought this film adaptation of the famed D.H. Lawrence novel by legendary cinematographer turned director Jack Cardiff was solid enough.  While the black and white CinemaScope film is pretty great looking, I’ll admit I could sense little of a Cardiff visual style – a style that came through loud and clear when he was serving as cinematographer for other directors, including such dominant figures like Powell, Huston, Lewin and Mankiewicz.  Just channel surfing the other day and catching a mere glimpse of The Master of Ballantree (a film I have not seen) the images screamed Cardiff (though admittedly when I think of Cardiff I think of spectacular color and, The Vikings aside, the academy aspect ratio).  Frankly the visual “personality” of Sons and Lovers seemed wholly that of its director of photography Freddie Francis – showing a style akin to Francis’ other work of the period as a DP in films like The Innocents or Night Must Fall.  In Paranoiac (a recent first viewing for me) Francis gets in the director’s chair leaving the DP tasks to another (Hammer films regular Arthur Grant); but the film still looks like a Freddie Francis shot film.  This suggests the similar almost seamless stylistic transition suggested by Nicolas Roeg’s move from cinematographer to director later the same decade.  With Sons and Lovers I was left with the peculiar irony that Cardiff’s move to the director’s chair seemed to diminish his unique artistic stamp.  Perhaps to a lesser extent, I had a similar feeling about Rudolph Maté, a man who directed dozens of films but also lensed some classics for the likes of giants such as Dreyer, Hitchcock, Wyler, Lubitsch, Lang and Vidor.

• Drum Beat (1954 – Delmer Daves) mixed(+) (cable)

I like Delmer Daves’ fifties Westerns a great deal, particularly 3:10 to Yuma, The Last Wagon and The Hanging Tree, and this CinemaScope effort, which deals with tensions between the US government and certain members of a Modoc Indian tribe along the California-Oregeon border country in 1869, has a number of nice elements; but I was left with a bit of an Alan Ladd problem.  Only a year removed from his performance in the rightfully lauded Shane in which Ladd emited some sort of iconic glow; Ladd seems to mail it in here, often looking tired and disengaged.  And I don’t mean “character tired”, in that his Indian fighter character Johnny MacKay has lived a hard life and is world weary, but “actor tired”, in that prior to each shooting day Ladd closed the nearest bar.  In one very key scene beautifully shot on location in a river valley involving an attempt at a peace treaty that goes horrible wrong, the shots of Ladd, clearly from some distant sound stage, are awkwardly inserted disrupting the tension and general flow.  It also doesn’t help that Ladd’s supposedly rough and tumble character is decked out in preposterously clean and colorful Roy Rogers styled finery.  What is particularly perplexing about the lackluster Ladd is that Drum Beat represents the first effort of Jaguar Productions, Ladd’s very own production company, so he had a strong personal connection and financial stake in the project.  At least Ladd had the good sense to employ Daves, who also scripted and produced, as the somewhat balanced material suggests a certain sympathy towards the Modoc people which has some connection to Daves’ earlier groundbreaking “pro-Indian” Western Broken Arrow (1954, the year of Drum Beat, would also see the likes of Sirk’s Taza, Son of Cochise and Aldrich’s Apache, other films with a sympathetic stance regarding the treatment of Native American Indians).  Though certain of the attacks by the Modocs on the war path are rather brutal; which brings to mind the rather shocking attack of the Abenakis tribe on White frontier folk in King Vidor’s Northwest Passage, a controversial film (at least today) which makes little effort to dilute a sense of racial hatred. Robert Keith and Elisha Cook Jr. offer colorful, if not three dimensional, support; but it’s Charles Bronson (then billed Charles Buckinsky) as Modoc renegade leader Captain Jack who leaves the biggest impression.  Ladd would seem slightly livelier four years later for Daves in The Badlanders an entertaining but more routine Western (and loose remake of The Asphalt Jungle).

• Bronson (2008 – Nicolas Winding Refn) con(+) (cable)
• Tomorrow is Another Day (1951 – Felix E. Feist) pro(+) (cable)

I’m a little reluctant to overreach with my praise and enthusiasm for this sleeper of a film noir given that it may have sprung from my going in with rather measured expectations; but what a pleasant surprise!  Steve Cochran plays an ex-con paroled from an 18 year stretch in prison having been convicted (as a 13 year old!) for shooting his abusive drunk of a father in order to protect his mother.  The big lug Cochran was a fairly limited actor (see his less than nuanced performance as a sort of Stanley Kowalski-lite in 1951’s Storm Warning) but he was perfectly cast here and delivers the goods, playing the parolee as an uneasy man-child and a sort of sympathetic loose canon ready to go off once sufficiently confused. Cochran works a real social misfit / fish out of water vibe that is not dissimilar to what Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro later accomplished with Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.  Upon release from prison and with little regard to the Warden’s friendly advice, Cochran’s never been kissed by a girl character soon naively and impulsively sets his sights on Ruth Roman’s Cay Higgins an ultra street smart dime-a-dance hall girl who works in “Dreamland” but doesn’t give “private lessons” (which, seemingly, dilutes the possibility that the lovely Cay doubles as a prostitute). Circumstances involving the shooting of a morally ambiguous police officer (pimp?) soon thrust the mis-matched pair into an uneasy alliance.  Cochran’s dummy and Roman’s crafty manipulator must hit the road and the fugitive experience allows the couple to grow into a true partnership of sorts, with loyalty and affection, all somewhat reminiscent of the Douglas Sirk directed and Sam Fuller penned Shockproof; or even such criminal lovers on the run classics such as They Live By Night or You Only Live Once.  Ruth Roman is really excellent in a challenging role whereby she is charged with making believable the reformation and redemption of her character.  Roman’s Cay must undergo a moral and physical transformation that turns a blonde dye jobbed taxi dancing femme fatale into a domesticated brunette lettuce picking mother to be.  The structure of the film is somewhat bi-furcated much like On Dangerous Ground, with the first half set in a rather seedy Manhattan and the second in sun-baked Northern California, and the switch in setting results in a shift in tone that risks the momentum built up in the strong first half; but director Feist and his ace DP Robert Burks (who lensed 12 Hitchcock films including 1951’s Strangers on a Train which also features Ruth Roman) ably hold it all together.  Like Shockproof, Tomorrow is Another Day does suffer from those (all too) typical of the period tidy and upbeat endings – but it’s a forgivable sin for such a nifty and intelligent film with strong central performances.

• The Phantom Carriage (1921 – Victor Sjostrom) pro(+) (Blu-Ray)
• The Steel Trap (1952 – Andrew L. Stone) pro(-) (cable)
• The Help (2011 – Tate Taylor) mixed(-) (Blu-Ray)
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011 – David Fincher) pro(-) (Theater)
• A Stolen Life (1946 – Curtis Bernhardt) pro (cable)
• The Adventures of Tintin (2011 – Steven Spielberg) pro (Theater – 3D)
• This Above All (1942 – Anatole Litvak) pro(-) (on-line)
• The Green Hornet (2011 – Michel Gondry) mixed (cable)

 Last Update -  December 31, 2011

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• High Pressure (1932 – Mervyn LeRoy) pro (cable)
• Margie (1946 – Henry King) pro (cable)
• 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974 – John Frankenheimer) mixed(-) (DVD)
  
• The Nickel Ride (1974 – Robert Mulligan) pro (DVD)
• Young Adult (2011 – Jason Reitman) pro (Theater)
• The Widow from Chicago (1930 – Edward F. Cline) pro(-) (cable)
• The Chapman Report (1962 – George Cukor) con(+) (cable)
• The Trip (2010 – Michael Winterbottom) pro(-) (cable)
• The Human Comedy (1943 – Clarence Brown) pro (cable)
• The Saphead (1920 – Herbert Blaché, Winchell Smith) mixed (cable)
• Beginners (2011 – Mike Mills) pro(-) (Blu-ray)
• A Page of Madness (1926 – Teinosuke Kinugasa) pro(+) (cable)
• Terri (2011 – Azazel Jacobs) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Fear and Desire (1953 – Stanley Kubrick) con(+) (cable)
• The Tree (2010 – Julie Bertuccelli) mixed (DVD)
• The Moon and Sixpence (1942 – Albert Lewin) pro(-) (cable)
• Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011 – Glenn Ficarra & John Requa) mixed (DVD)
• The Long Night (1947 – Anatole Litvak) pro(-) (DVD)
• A Life of Her Own (1950 – George Cukor) mixed (cable)
• Murder! (1930 – Alfred Hitchcock) mixed(+) (on-line)
• Madam Satan (1930 – Cecil B. DeMille) pro(-) (on-line)
• Sweet November (1968 – Robert Ellis Miller) mixed (cable)
• To Please a Lady (1950 – Clarence Brown) mixed (cable)
• Hugo (2011 – Martin Scorsese) pro (Theater – 3D)
• Jeanne Eagels (1957 – George Sidney) con(+) (cable)
• Young Man of Manhattan (1930 – Monta Bell) mixed(+) (on-line)
• Playing Around (1930 – Mervyn LeRoy) mixed (on-line)

I really enjoyed bubbly blonde Alice White playing rather comedic trampy girls in supporting roles in the solid 1933 films Employees’ Entrance and Picture Snatcher and was curious about her earlier films as a headlining star.  A survey of the names of the characters White played (like Giggles, Dixie, Lulu, Delight(!) & Goldie) provides a pretty quick indication of the types of roles White got.  Here, in this late Jazz Age morality tale directed by Mervyn Leroy who would helm six of her films, White plays Sheba a regular neighborhood girl that wins a nightclub “legs” contest and then gets wooed away from her steadfast but thrifty beau by slick but emty and immoral flash (in the form of a smarmy Chester Morris as a nightclub gadabout/stick up man).  Technical challenges of early talkies aside, it’s clear why White never developed into the Clara Bow of the sound era – she just lacked the acting chops.  It’s perhaps not surprising to learn (if you can trust Wikipedia) that White took a two year hiatus from films in order to “improve her acting abilities”.  Perhaps Warner Bros. just put her in the penalty box – the professional golf equivalent of being sent to Q-School. In any event, she did in fact improve, but despite her comeback top billing would never return – a 1933 sex scandal involving a rather lurid sounding love triangle also didn’t help much.  I plan on checking out another 1930 Alice White starring vehicle next – The Widow from Chicago (as “Palpitating” Polly Dorgan no less) co-starring a pre-Little Caesar Edward G. Robinson.

• Picture Snatcher (1933 – Lloyd Bacon) pro (DVD)
• Lawyer Man (1932 – William Dieterle) mixed(+) (cable)
• Lady Killer (1933 – Roy Del Ruth) pro (DVD)
• Redemption (1930 – Fred Niblo) mixed (cable)
• Born to Win (1971 – Ivan Passer) pro(-) (on-line)
• Crisis (1950 – Richard Brooks) pro(-) cable)
• Seventh Heaven (1937 – Henry King) pro(-) (cable)
• Born Reckless (1930 – John Ford, Andrew Bennison) mixed(+) (DVD)

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November 2011

 Last Update -  December 1, 2011

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• Walk Softly, Stranger (1950 – Robert Stevenson) pro(-) (cable)
• Unknown (2011 – Jaume Collet-Serra) mixed(-) (cable)
• Easy Living (1949 – Jacques Tourneur) mixed(+) (cable)
• The Divorcee (1930 – Robert Z. Leonard) pro(-) (DVD)
• Le désordre et la nuit (The Night Affair) (1958 – Gilles Grangier) mixed (cable)
• September Affair (1950 – William Dieterle) pro(-) (on-line)

The Kurt Weill (music)/Maxwell Anderson (lyrics) penned pop standard “September Song”, which figures very prominently in this film, has long been a favorite of mine, though I came to it by way of Sarah Vaughn’s 1955 version. I was surprised to learn that the song was popularized by actor (and rather limited singer) Walter Huston in the 1938 Broadway play Knickerbocker Holiday (Charles Coburn would take on the Huston role (historical figure Peter Stuyvesant) in the largely forgotten 1943 film version of the play).  It’s the recording of the original Huston rendition of the song that gets the spotlight in September Affair, even leading to its reappearance on the pop charts of the day. Coincidence or not, it ends up being a rather fitting tribute to the actor who passed away just six months prior to the film’s release (as a film actor Huston would go out on a high note with Anthony Mann’s The Furies).  Huston’s technically imperfect but heartfelt and effective interpretation providing a suitably melancholy vibe that imbues the entirety of this bittersweet romance.  As for the film itself, it’s the least of William Dieterle’s four “Joseph Cotten romances” (I prefer the earlier Portrait of Jennie, Love Letters and I’ll Be Seeing You) but still a rather lovely, often restrained and “adult” film that eschews some of the emotional amplification of many a melodrama.  The story, set in Italy, involves circumstances that allow for Cotten’s character to fake his own death in order to escape a loveless marriage and burdensome career.  It’s difficult to make Cotten’s somewhat caddish character in the film sympathetic; but the lovely Joan Fontaine as his pianist love interest and partner in escapism does her best to soften the edge (Fontaine’s similarly plays dead but, unlike Cotten’s character, has no spouse or child).  Jessica Tandy does quite well with her rather thankless role as Cotten’s forsaken spouse. There are various travelogue elements in the film (the couple explore Florence, Pompeii and Capri) but they don’t seem perfunctory or otherwise shoe horned into the story.  In some ways prefiguring similar elements in the likes of Roman Holiday, It Started in Naples, or even Viaggio in Italia.

• Trigger (2010 – Bruce McDonald) mixed(-) (cable)
• Take a Letter, Darling (1942 – Mitchell Leisen) pro (on-line)
• Thirty Day Princess (1934 – Marion Gering) pro(-) (on-line)
• Salty O”Rourke (1945 – Raoul Walsh) pro(-) (on-line)
• My Cousin Rachel (1952 – Henry Koster) pro (on-line)

This gothic mystery-romance starring Olivia De Havilland (in her first post-The Heiress role) and Richard Burton (quite effective in his first Hollywood based film, even receiving a best actor in a “supporting” role Oscar nomination despite being the film’s protagonist and appearing in most every scene) might play well on a double bill with Rebecca – given that the 1940 classic is also an adaptation of a like spirited Cornwall set Daphne du Maurier novel and stars De Havilland’s (only slightly) younger sister Joan Fontaine (actually the film also shares elements with three other Fontaine efforts from the forties – Suspicion, Ivy and Jane Eyre).  The plot is slightly preposterous (man falls in love with a widow despite his active suspicion that she murdered his cousin for his sizable fortune) and the approach overly manipulative; but it’s all certainly compelling if you are willing to just go with it; though the film is sure to frustrate anyone that likes their mysteries actually solved.  In the end the De Havilland character’s guilt or innocence is just as unclear as Ann Todd character’s at the end of David Lean’s Madeleine.  De Havilland ably works a rather nebulous sweet/nefarious dynamic that suggests her work as twins in The Dark Mirror and prefigures her dual natured Hush …Hush, Sweet Charlotte character.  Joseph LaShelle’s (Oscar nominated) cinematography is so effectively expressive one might mistake director Henry Koster for a stylist.  Versatile Twentieth Century Fox stalwart Nunnally Johnson wrote the script and produced.

• Caged (1950 – John Cromwell) pro (cable)
• Laughter (1930 – Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast) pro (on-line)
• That Night’s Wife (1930 – Yasujiro Ozu) pro(-) (cable)
• Anna Christie (1930 – Clarence Brown) mixed (cable)
• Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011 – Sean Durkin) pro (Theater)
• One-Eyed Jacks (1961 – Marlon Brando) pro (Blu-Ray)
• The Story Of The Fox (1930 -Irene & Wladyslaw Starewicz) pro(+) (on-line)
• Hall Pass (2011 – Peter & Bobby Farrelly) mixed (cable)
• The Bank Dick (1940 – Edward F. Cline) pro (cable)
• Limitless (2011 – Neil Burger) mixed (cable)
• The Switch (2010 – Josh Gordon & Will Speck) con(+) (cable)
• Les amants de Montparnasse (Montparnasse 19)  (1958 – Jacques Becker) pro (on-line)

There’s something more than a little tiresome about films centering on the tragic lives of impoverished, self destructive, womanizing, substance abusing painters that go unappreciated in their own time – even if the historical facts support the treatment, the result typically reeks of cliche.  Yet, this effort made in black and white (unlike painter biopics from earlier the same decade like Huston’s Moulin Rouge or Minnelli’s Lust for Life) and centering on the France based Jewish-Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, despite having the typical plot elements and overall narrative trajectory, slowly but surely won me over.  The appeal for me was largely due to the performances of the sensitive Gérard Philipe as the volatile and tubercular artist, the lovely Anouk Aimée as the 19 year old art student and Modigliani model Jeanne Hébuterne and the vivacious Lilli Palmer as Modigliani’s worldly lover/model Beatrice Hastings, a woman that’s part patron, part masochist.  Though it’s Lino Ventura in a much smaller role as an opportunistic art dealer named Morel that left perhaps the greatest impression on me.  Morel hovers stone-faced over the proceedings like Bengt Ekerot’s angel of death from The Seventh Seal – but without a sense of neutrality, he exudes the malevolent patience of a vulture (and suggests a different sort of assassin than the gangster versions he would most famously later portray).  The ending of the film from Modigliani’s feverish death spiral to Model’s parasitic acquisition of an inventory of masterworks is a real gut punch –perhaps overly blunt in execution, but soul crushingly effective nonetheless.  Outside the opening segment (which may have been directed by the great Max Ophüls who started the project but passed way in the early days of production) I found the film rather undistinguished visually, a little flat and, despite the period setting (circa 1919), generally anachronistic.  A little surprising given that I found other Jacques Becker films, like the sublime period film Casque d’Or, to be full of style and visual interest. Perhaps it’s all the result of the film’s seemingly troubled production history– with the death of Ophüls, Gérard Philipe saddled with his own terminal illness and Becker quarrelling with screenwriter Henri Jeanson (of Pépé le Moko, Hôtel du Nord and Fanfan la Tulipe fame) over the script.  It’s fitting that Modigliani had the nickname “Modi”, which is transalated/derived from “cursed”/“maudit”, for Les Amants de Montparnasse could certainly be considered a film maudit.  Within a few years of the film entering production three key figures would be dead – Ophüls at age 54, Becker at age 53, and, perhaps most tragically, Philipe at age 36 (the same age as Modigliani).

• Little Man, What Now? (1934 – Frank Borzage) PRO(-) (on-line)
• Melancholia (2011 – Lars von Trier) PRO (Theater)
• I Married a Witch (1942 – Rene Clair) pro (on-line)
• The Shepherd of the Hills (1941 – Henry Hathaway) pro(+) (on-line)
• It Always Rains On Sunday (1947 – Robert Hamer) PRO(-) (on-line)

There is a scene is Cavalcanti’s memorable “Britnoir’ They Made Me a Fugitive that has stuck with me. In it, Trevor Howard as a former R.A.F. pilot turned racketeer and fugitive from justice breaks into a home for temporary sanctuary only to find that the housewife occupant is not so much a vulnerable victim in fear for her safety, but a sudden opportunist willing to barter the shelter for the murder of her drunken husband.  It’s a surprising and nasty little moment that elevates the whole film for me.  By shrinking the divide between the criminal element and the economically depressed post war citizenry, a certain thematic complexity results.  Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday is able to carry that type of nuance and nasty tone throughout the entirety of his excellent film, a film in which convenient labels like “film noir”, “kitchen sink drama” and “social realism” fail to offer adequate description.  The film, set against the backdrop of a prisoner’s escape from Dartmoor prison (as was the earlier excellent late period British silent The Cottage on Dartmoor), offers a slice of bleak and gloomy post war London life in the East End, an area predominantly populated with working class Jews and its fair share of petty grifters, spivs, thick skinned survivors, adulterers and plain old towns folk living lives of quiet desperation (a community later given a far warmer treatment by Carol Reed in A Kid for Two Farthings).  The fugitive in this case (John McCallum playing a criminal far less sympathetic than Trevor Howard in They Made Me a Fugitive or that other 1947 UK film fugitive James Mason in Odd Man Out) seeks assistance from a now married old girlfriend with an unextinguished torch for him (an excellent Googie Withers, R.I.P. July 15, 2011).  The fugitive and the townsfolk are clearly cut from the same cloth and simple good and evil designations do not do any of the players real justice.  To contrast with another excellent gritty noir tinged British film from the same year – John Boulton’s Brighton Rock – the denizens in It Always Rains on Sunday have none of the sociopathic malevolence of Richard Attenborough’s gangster Pinkie Brown nor do they have any of the supreme naiveté of Carol Nash’s god fearing Rose Brown; their nature lay in the nebulous middle.  While Brighton Rock speaks of two co-existing but decidedly separate worlds, a sunny seaside destination for weekend tourists on one hand and the crime ridden underbelly on the other, Hamer’s film leaves us with a single fully integrated world, a world where the warts are in plain sight.  The multitude of colorful characters are given enough room to breathe so that, despite the film’s limited time frame (the action is contained to one Sunday), a real lived in environment is created and a sort of social tapestry results.  If it weren’t for a certain softening in the film’s final scene between two of the leads (though hardly your run of the mill “happy ending”) this film might be seen as pure nihilism.  Almost makes one forget that Ealing Studios is best known for comedy (and Hamer would go on to direct arguably the studio’s greatest triumph, and the blackest of comedies – Kind Hearts and Coronets).

• A Star is Born (1937 – William A. Wellman) pro (cable)
• 7th Cavalry (1956 – Joseph H. Lewis) mixed (cable)
• The Makioka Sisters (1983 – Kon Ichikawa) pro (Blu-Ray)
• Mike’s Murder (1984 – James Bridges) mixed (on-line)
• We Can’t Go Home Again (1976 – Nicholas Ray) con (cable)
• I Hate But Love (1962 – Koreyoshi Kurahara) pro(-) (DVD)
• College (1927 – James W. Horne & Buster Keaton) pro(-) (cable)
• California Conquest (1952 – Lew Landers) con (cable)
• June Night (1940 – Per Lindberg) pro(-) (DVD)
• Count the Hours (1953 – Don Siegel) mixed(-) (cable)

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OCTOBER 2011

Last Update - October 31, 2011

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• Let Me In (2010 – Matt Reeves) pro (cable)
• House of Wax (1953 – Andre De Toth) pro (cable)
• House on Haunted Hill (1959 – William Castle) mixed(+) (cable)
• Pit and the Pendulum (1961 – Roger Corman) pro (cable)
• The Masque of the Red Death (1964 – Roger Corman) mixed(+) (cable)
• Daguerréotypes(1976 – Agnès Varda) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Hot Blood (1956 – Nicholas Ray) mixed (cable)
• The Stars Look Down (1940 – Carol Reed) pro (on-line)
• Hollow Triumph (1948 – Steve Sekely) pro (cable)
• Tea and Sympathy (1956 – Vincente Minnelli) pro(-) (cable)
• Little White Lies (2010 – Guillaume Canet) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Bandido (1956 – Richard Fleischer) pro(-) (cable)
• End of the Road (1970 – Aram Avakian) con (DVD)
• Cars 2 (2011 – John Lasseter, Brad Lewis) mixed (DVD)
• Paul (2011 – Greg Mottola) mixed (Blu-Ray)
• Wind Across the Everglades (1958 – Nicholas Ray) mixed (cable)
• Casanova ’70 (1965 – Mario Monicelli) pro (Blu-Ray)
• A Child is Waiting (1963 – John Cassavetes) pro (cable)
• Intimate Lighting (1965 – Ivan Passer) pro(+) (on-line)
• Incendies (2010 – Denis Villeneuve) pro(-) (Blu-Ray)
• All Good Things (2010 – Andrew Jarecki) mixed (cable)
• The Red Lily (1924 – Fred Niblo) pro (cable)
• Road to Nowhere (2010 – Monte Hellman) mixed (DVD)
• The Woman on Pier 13 (1949 – Robert Stevenson) mixed (cable)
• Jane Eyre (2011 – Cary Fukunaga) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Go West (1925 – Buster Keaton) pro (Blu-Ray)
• Me and My Gal (1932 – Raoul Walsh) pro(+) (on-line)
• The Miniver Story (1950 – H.C. Potter) mixed (cable)
• Experiment Alcatraz (1950 – Edward L. Cahn) mixed (cable)
• Les Cousins (1959 – Claude Chabrol) PRO(-) (Blu-Ray)
• Angry Street (1950 – Mikio Naruse) pro (DVD-R)
• Meek’s Cutoff (2010 – Kelly Reichardt) pro(+) (Blu-Ray)
• The Power and the Glory (1933 – William K. Howard) mixed(+) (cable)
• Drive (2011 – Nicolas Winding Refn) pro (Theater)
• The Group (1966 – Sidney Lumet) mixed(+) (cable)
• Castle on the Hudson (1940 – Anatole Litvak) mixed(+) (cable)
• Three Secrets (1950 – Robert Wise) mixed(+) (on-line)
• The Vanishing Virginian (1942 – Frank Borzage) pro(-) (cable)
• Street Scene (1931 – King Vidor) pro(+) (cable)
• American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950 – Fritz Lang) mixed (on-line)
• The Constant Nymph (1943 – Edmund Goulding) pro(-) (cable)

Last Update -  October 3, 2011

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• Contagion (2011 – Steven Soderbergh) pro (Theater)
• Back Street (1941 – Robert Stevenson) pro (cable)
• Annie Get Your Gun (1950 – George Sidney) pro (cable)
• Le Beau Serge (1958 – Claude Chabrol) pro (Blu-Ray)
• Our Very Own (1950 – David Miller) mixed (cable)

If you can get past both the idea that there was once a stigma surrounding adoption and the extended opening set piece drenched in suburban wholesomeness (if someone put little pig tailed Penny Macauly (12 year old Natalie Wood) in a burlap sack and tossed her in the river no court would convict them), this somewhat unique Samuel Goldwyn produced drama has some distinct rewards.  Specifically the two scenes featuring Ann Dvorak (here at the tail end of her notable film career) as the woman from the other side of the tracks who gave up her baby for adoption.  Each scene is played with a certain nuance suggesting both an edge and sensitivity – a sort of emotional realism devoid of stock villainry, easy answers or tidy resolution (the first scene is with the adoptive mother played by Jane Wyatt, the second with the child, now a high school senior, rather nicely portrayed by Ann Blyth – in sort of a 180 degree turn from her most famous role as the icy and petulant Veda Pierce).  The class and social differences between the Wyatt/Blyth characters and the Dvorak character are accented, but with a certain diplomacy.  Shame the rest of the film couldn’t match these key scenes for depth and interest.  The bulk of the rest of the film is serviceably populated with teenage love affairs (Farley Granger plays Blyth’s unimpeachable love interest), graduation preparations and sibling rivalry. The theme of adoption would play a key role in a very different sort of film from 1950 – Robert Wise’s Three Secrets, a film that borrows the structure from A Letter to Three Wives.

• King Solomon’s Mines (1950 – Compton Bennett & Andrew Marton) mixed(+) (cable)
• Things to Come (1936 – William Cameron Menzies) pro(-) (cable)
• The Red House (1947 – Delmer Daves) mixed(+) (on-line)
• Police, Adjective (2009 – Corneliu Porumboiu) mixed (DVD)
• The Kennel Murder Case (1933 – Michael Curtiz) pro(-) (cable)
• Tamara Drewe (2010 – Stephen Frears) pro(-) (DVD)
• Employees’ Entrance (1933 – Roy Del Ruth) pro (cable)
• Visions of Eight (1973 – Various) pro (DVD)
• The Adjustment Bureau (2011 – George Nolfi) mixed (DVD)
• Bright Leaf (1950 – Michael Curtiz) mixed(+) (cable)
• The Descendants (2011 – Alexander Payne) PRO(-) (Theater)
• The Story of Temple Drake (1933 – Stephen Roberts) pro (cable)
• Win Win (2011 – Thomas McCarthy) pro(-) (Blu-Ray)
• Harriet Craig (1950 – Vincent Sherman) pro(-) (on-line)
• The Clouded Yellow (1950 – Ralph Thomas) pro(-) (on-line)
• The World of Suzie Wong (1960 – Richard Quine) mixed (DVD)
• I Walk Alone (1948 – Byron Haskin) pro(-) (cable)
• The Testament of Orpheus (1960 – Jean Cocteau) pro (DVD)
• Moneyball (2011 – Bennett Miller) pro(+) (Theater)
• The Bellboy (1960 – Jerry Lewis) mixed (DVD)
• The Plumber (1979 – Peter Weir) pro(-) (cable)
• The Breaking Point (1950 – Michael Curtiz) pro(+) (cable)
• The Warped Ones (1960 – Koreyoshi Kurahara) pro (DVD)
• In a Better World (2010 – Susanne Bier) pro (Blu-ray)
• Of Gods and Men (2010 – Xavier Beauvois) pro (DVD)
• Captain America: The First Avenger (2011 – Joe Johnston) pro(-) (Theater)
• Leur dernière nuit (1953 – Georges Lacombe) pro(-) (cable)
• Source Code (2011 – Duncan Jones) pro(-) (DVD)
• La vérité (1960 – Henri-Georges Clouzot) pro (DVD-R)

Brigitte Bardot’s star power has always far outweighed the films of value in her filmography, but I imagine La vérité registers on the top end of the quality range.  It appears that many reviewers and commentators feel La vérité contains her best (least decorative) performance.  It’s certainly a performance that, while still in a nymphet mode, demonstrates some range, and the grim black and white photography, downbeat storyline and gritty urban setting offers little of the colorful and scenic distractions of a film like …And God Created Woman.  Jean-Luc Godard in employing Bardot in Contempt, from the Producer mandated bare derriere opening to death by sports coupe finale, was in complete control of the Bardot image as film content.  Seemingly simultaneously celebrating, subverting, indicting, and deconstructing Bardot’s status as a sex icon, her star power never dominates Contempt to the extent that the director’s authorial stamp is diminished in any way.  I’m not sure the same can be said of La vérité, a film structured in flashbacks around the trial of a young feckless and impudent woman (Bardot) charged with murdering her former lover (Sami Frey), a boy on society’s “right track”.  While the opening moments in the court room, offering an extremely cynical view of the French legal system, scream a sort of Clouzotian misanthropy, once the focus shifts to Bardot, her every glance and gesture dominate the screen to the point that Clouzot, the director of such distinct style and voice (though certainly in 1960 terms on the outside of the nouvelle vague), fades into the background (at least until the memorable but rather pitiless conclusion).  For better or worse, Bardot becomes, if you will, the film’s auteur.  Examinations of youth culture (and related idleness and delinquency) was the rage around world cinema at this time, and the rather obvious subtext to the story is that not only is the character Bardot plays been put on trial by the moralistic establishment; but the image of Bardot the actress and pin-up and the youth culture it represents (convention defying, hedonistic, modern) has been put on trial.  Needless to say, the film is sympathetic to the emerging counter culture and to rebellious youth in general; though the Bohemian café society of Bardot and cronies in the film seems rather benign when compared to more aggressive activities (rape, assault, robbery) in the youth and “sun tribe” films emerging from Japan at the time (see for instance Nagisa Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth or Koreyoshi Kurahara’s The Warped Ones)

• The Lady is Willing (1942 – Mitchell Leisen) pro(-) (cable)

Preposterous fluff, but real a fun film, at least until it’s almost derailed when the story turns just a tad too serious in the final act (baby on the verge of death! – shades of Carole Lombard foregoing her usual screwball hijinks for maternal worry in the climax of  1939′s Made for Each Other).  Marlene Dietrich plays a Broadway diva who gets a sudden maternal itch and ends up finding (more like abducting!) an infant by and entering into a marriage of convenience with a science minded child hating doctor (Fred MacMurray, director Mitchell Leisen’s go to actor for 9 films).  Leisen made some excellent films in this period (usually for Paramount, this one is for Columbia) and The Lady is Willing is certainly not the strongest (Leisen’s MacMurray / Rosalind Russell gender reversal romantic comedy Take a Letter, Darling from the same year, while minor, is a slightly better bet), but I guess I’m a sucker for Dietrich the comedienne, I find her timing impeccable  (see also winning turns in Destry Rides Again, The Flame of New Orleans).

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August 2011

Last Update - August 31, 2011

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• Vigil in the Night (1940 – George Stevens) mixed (cable)
• Intimidation (1960 – Koreyoshi Kurahara) pro (DVD)
• Everybody Does It (1949 – Edmund Goulding) pro(-) (cable)
• Let’s Make Love (1960 – Geogre Cukor) mixed (DVD)
• Juarez (1939 – William Dieterle) mixed(+) (cable)
• Remorques (1941 – Jean Gremillon) pro (cable)
• The Spy in Black (1939 – Michael Powell) pro(-) (cable)
• Gueule d’amour (1937 – Jean Gremillon) PRO (cable)

My first Gremillon film, and it’s a stunner. Critic David Thomson doesn’t always get it right in his Biographical Dictionary of Film (he can frustrate and provoke as much as he can inspire), but with his Jean Gremillon entry he’s 100% correct when he writes: “Gueule d’Amour leaves one in no doubt – Gremillon was a remarkable director…This is a cinema of inner, emotional realism, with subtle, secretive performances and an eye that invests objects and places with poetic meaning. The film is unerringly modern and it makes one want to see anything by Gremillon.”  The film contains the best Jean Gabin performance I’ve seen to date (and from the year of no less than Grand Illusion and Pepe le Moko !) in a somewhat challenging role where he must at various times communicate good humor, total confidence, rebellion, bitter defeat, obsession and overwhelming anger.  Gabin’s co-star from Pepe le Moko, the enchanting Mireille Balin, plays the pathologically unpredicatble love interest to excellent effect.

• Ride the Pink Horse (1947 – Robert Montgomery) pro(+) (on-line)
• Maria Chapdelaine (1934 – Julien Duvivier) pro (cable)
• Midnight in Paris (2011 – Woody Allen) pro (Theater)
• The Unholy Three (1925 – Tod Browning) pro(-) (cable)
• Horrible Bosses (2011 – Seth Gordon) con (Theater)
• The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972 – Paul Newman) pro (cable)
• Teresa Venerdi (1941 – Vittorio De Sica) pro(+) (Theater)

This pre-neo-realist Italo-screwball is a rather amiable but chaste sex farce with Vittorio De Sica playing a debonair lay about physician who, on the verge of financial ruin and after trying the patience of his once indulgent father, is forced into public service – specifically, an appointment as the health inspector to a girl’s orphanage.  To complicate things he is pursued by three rather distinct women – a gold digging showgirl (a delightful Anna Magnani, in a small role leaving audiences begging for more), a mattress company heiress and wannabe poet of limited depth and talent (Irasema Dilian), and the titular orphan girl, a nurse in training who oozes goodness and romanticism (an absolutely lovely Adriana Benetti, best known for Alessandro Blasetti’s 4 passi fra le nuvole).  Teresa Venerdi is an extremely funny and charming film more indicative of the comedies De Sica appears in as an actor (like Luigi Comencini’s Bread, Love and Dreams or Blasseti’s Too Bad She’s Bad) than his more serious minded international successes as a director (De Sica rarely acted in the films he directed).  Despite the dashing De Sica and the impressive troika of female talent, it’s Virgilio Riento as the doctor’s slightly bumbling man servant the steals every scene he’s in.  Screened at the Ontario Cinemateque as part of an Italian Neo-Realism series; but if there’s any neo-realism present in form, content or tone, it’s at the most embryonic stage.  More appropriately, the film seems to serve the series as an example of the type of Fascist government controlled studio product that provided the entertainment of the day – hinting at the transformation to come from the artifice of the middle class soothing Telefono Bianco (white telephone) style to a mode of grit and naturalism, with themes of resistance against the political order.  De Sica’s portrayal of the orphanage at least suggests sympathy to the poor and mild resistance to fascism.  De Sica would make his big stylistic jump in 1944 with The Children are Watching Us.

• Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928 – Herbert Brenon) pro (cable)
• West of Zanzibar (1928 – Tod Browning) pro (cable)
• Life Begins at Forty (1935 – George Marshall) pro (cable)
• East Side, West Side (1949 – Mervyn LeRoy) mixed(+) (cable)
• The Secret Fury (1950 – Mel Ferrer) mixed (cable)
• The Great Race (1965 – Blake Edwards) con (cable)

Based on those ever reliable comments on the internet this film seems like it has a rather solid reputation as a crowd pleasing mainstream comedy.  A manic film in an “epic” form, seemingly inspired by the box office success of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  I found it tiresome, rarely funny (lots of moldy sub-vaudevillian gags) and bloated (with overture, intermission and exit music it’s 160 minutes long, dragged down by a sluggish Prisoner of Zenda “look a likes” sub-plot).  Jack Lemmon (in full ham) and Tony Curtis play adversaries (Professor Fate vs. The Great Leslie) competing in a turn of the century around the world automobile race and their re-pairing brings none of that Some Like it Hot magic.  Natalie Wood as a feisty suffragette and journalist in training is along for the ride and approaches the material with some straight faced gusto despite reportedly hating the experience.   Filmed very much like a live action cartoon, which is certainly an irreverant style up director Blake Edwards’ alley; but the film could have had a few more Frank Tashlin like knowing winks. If epic pie fights get you knee slapping (“the largest pie fight ever staged”) – maybe this will work for you.

• Tormento (1950 – Raffaello Matarazzo) pro(-) (DVD)
• Kisses (1957 – Yasuzo Masumura) pro(-) (on-line)
• Brighton Rock (1947 – John Boulting) pro(+) (on-line)
• The Big Street (1942 – Irving Reis) pro(-) (cable)
• Palm Springs Weekend (1963 – Norman Taurog) con(+) (cable)
• The Crowd Roars (1932 – Howard Hawks) pro(-) (cable)
• The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947 – Albert Lewin) pro(+) (on-line)
• Keeper of the Flame (1942 – George Cukor) pro (cable)
• Secretariat (2010 – Randall Wallace) mixed(+) (cable)
• Bird (1988 – Clint Eastwood) pro(-) (cable)
• Portrait of Madame Yuki (1950 – Kenji Mizoguchi) pro(-) (on-line)
• X-Men: First Class (2011 – Matthew Vaughn) pro (Theater)
• Marriage Italian Style (1964 – Vittorio De Sica) pro (Blu-Ray)
• No Man of Her Own (1950 – Mitchell Leisen) pro(+) (on-line)
• No Sad Songs for Me (1950 – Rudolph Mate) pro(-) (cable)
• Ice Station Zebra (1968 – John Sturges) mixed(+) (cable)
• Life During Wartime (2009 – Todd Solondz) mixed(+) (Blu-Ray)
• Daybreak (1931 – Jacques Feyder) pro (cable)

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July 2011

Last Update – July 31, 2011

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• They Won’t Forget (1937 – Mervyn LeRoy) pro (cable)
• Taza, Son of Cochise (1954 – Douglas Sirk) pro(-) (DVD)
• Dallas (1950 – Stuart Heisler) pro(-) (DVD)
• Double Indemnity (1973 – Jack Smight) con(+) (DVD)
• The Good German (2006 – Steven Soderbergh) mixed (DVD)
• The King and Four Queens (1956 – Raoul Walsh) mixed (cable)
• Band of Angels (1957 – Raoul Walsh) pro(-) (cable)
• Mon oncle d’Amérique (1980 – Alain Resnais) pro(+) (cable)
• Heat Lightning (1934 – Mervyn LeRoy) pro (cable)
• Tom Horn (1980 – William Wiard) pro(-) (DVD)

Watching this late period Steve McQueen vehicle (his penultimate film) just after another 1980 Western – the more highly regarded Walter Hill film The Long Riders – was a gentle reminder of the impact of star power.  Hill’s film has a certain formal rigor that highlights his skill with artful compositions, dynamic action sequences (with, in this case, certain shades of the best in Sam Peckinpah films) and his ability to elicit subdued performances.  The type of film that auteurist segment of the film buff set tends to eat up.  In contrast, Tom Horn , with its poor critical reception, failure at the box office, cancer ridden star and an extremely muddled production history that would suggest a lack of central vision (reportedly five directors worked on the movie – with McQueen running the show) would seem to have little going for it.  While it may have been my low expectations going in, I found the film an entertaining and generally compelling end of the gun slinging West story.  While Hill’s film may have a more consistent visual look, more appealing editing rhythms and a more impressive action set piece, I found little in the look of Tom Horn to sneeze at (it was lensed, after all, by the great DP John Alonzo).  What Tom Horn does have is the indelible personality of McQueen more than a decade removed from the peak of his King of Cool persona. Even here as a terminally ill 50 year old playing a raggedy and simple minded army scout turned hired gun by a hypocritical consortium of ranchers – the icon delivers.  McQueen exhibiting the kind of charisma that the stunt casted army of brothers (the Carradines, Keachs, Quaids and Guests – though creditable actors all) in The Long Riders couldn’t cumulatively match.  I tend to pick my movies by director, but here is a reminder that there often times when it’s just as rewarding to pick your film by the star.

• In the City of Sylvia (2007 – Jose Luis Guerin) pro (DVD)
• The Long Riders (1980 – Walter Hill) pro(-) (DVD)
• The Golden Stallion (1949 – William Witney) mixed (cable)
• Grown-Ups (1980 – Mike Leigh) pro(-) (DVD)
• Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979 – John Sayles) pro (DVD)
• That Brennan Girl (1946 – Alfred Santell) pro (on-line)
• Lightning Over Water (1980 – Wim Wenders) mixed (DVD)
• Split Second (1953 – Dick Powell) pro(-) (cable)
• Essential Killing (2010 – Jerzy Skolimowski) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Chains (1949 – Raffaello Matarazzo) pro(-) (DVD)
• The Sheltering Sky (1990 – Bernardo Bertolucci) pro (DVD)
• Two O’Clock Courage (1945 – Anthony Mann) mixed (cable)
• My Mother’s Castle (1990 – Yves Robert) pro(-) (DVD)
• Follow Me Quietly (1949 – Richard Fleischer) mixed(+) (cable)
• Vincent & Theo (1990 – Robert Altman) pro (DVD)
• The Dinner Game (1998 – Francis Veber) mixed(+) (VHS)

JUNE 2011

Last Update July 2, 2011

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• The Romantic Englishwoman (1975 – Joseph Losey) pro(-) (DVD)
• My Father’s Glory (1990 – Yves Robert) pro (DVD)
• Rome Adventure (1962 – Delmer Daves) mixed (cable)
• Adua and Her Friends (1960 – Antonio Pietrangeli) pro(+) (DVD)
• The Tree of Life (2011 – Terrence Malick) PRO(-) (Theater)
• The Hairdresser’s Husband (1990 – Patrice Leconte) pro (DVD)

A sneaky little movie with a surface aura of romantic fantasy, a film bathed in a sort of nostalgic amber glow you would almost think it’s a sanitized feel good endeavor; but in the end it’s really closer to Oshima’s nihilistic insular world of two from In the Realm of the Senses than it is to, say, Lasse Hallstrom’s Chocolat.  The entire focus of the story is on an odd impulsive marriage between an eccentric man (Jean Rochefort, a little old for the role) and a beautiful hairstylist named Mathilde (Italian actress Anna Galiena), a union seemingly confined solely to a storefront (the hair salon) with barely a glimpse of a kitchen, bedroom or other rooms of ordinary matrimonial living.  In Leconte’s universe The Hairdresser’s Husband suggests both the voyeurism turned to perverse obsession from Monsieur Hire (Leconte’s excellent remake of Julien Duvivier’s Panique) and the slightly twisted and ultimately destructive unconditional love offered by the Captain (Daniel Auteuil) to Madame La (Juliette Binoche) in The Widow of Saint-Pierre.  The salon where hair is cut offers both a ritualized experience and intimacy not unlike Sandrine Bonnaire’s confessional therapy sessions with Fabrice Luchini (playing a tax auditor mistaken for a psychiatrist) in Leconte’s Intimate Strangers.  Mathilde’s passion subdued by melancholy suggests the suicidal impulse and life on the edge in Leconte’s knife throwing act The Girl on the Bridge.  Across all these films it seems to me that Leconte has blurred the lines between romanticism and fetishism – where eroticism can lead to annihilation

• Despair (1978 – Rainer Werner Fassbinder) pro(-) (DVD)
• State of Grace (1990 – Phil Joanou) pro(-) (DVD)
  
• The Housemaid (2010 – Sang-soo Im) mixed(-) (DVD)
• Platform (2000 – Jia Zhang Ke) mixed(+) (DVD-R)
  
• Super 8 (2011 – J.J. Abrams) pro (Theater)
• Cinevardaphoto (2004 – Agnes Varda) pro (DVD)
• Chopper (2000 – Andrew Dominik) pro(-) (DVD)
  
• Insignificance (1985 – Nicolas Roeg) mixed(+) (DVD)
• The Gleaners and I (2000 – Agnes Varda) pro(+) (DVD)
• Audition (2000 – Takashi Miike) pro(-) (DVD)
  
• Carlos (2010 – Olivier Assayas) pro (+) (Blu-Ray)
• Seance (2000 – Kiyoshi Kurosawa) pro (DVD)
• The Way to the Stars (1945 – Anthony Asquith) pro (cable)
• Jack Goes Boating (2010 – Philip Seymour Hoffmann) con(+) (cable)
• Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009 – Damien Chazelle) mixed (DVD)
  
• The Widow of Saint-Pierre (2000 – Patrice Leconte) pro (DVD)
• The Wolf Man (1941 – George Waggner) pro(-) (cable)
• Shoot the Moon (1982 – Alan Parker) pro (cable)
  
• With a Friend Like Harry (2000 – Dominik Moll) pro (DVD)
• Ivansxtc (2000 – Bernard Rose) pro (DVD)
• Hurry Sundown (1967 – Otto Preminger) con (DVD)
  
• Above Suspicion (1943 – Richard Thorpe) mixed(+) (cable)
• Blue Valentine (2010 – Derek Cianfrance) pro (Blu-Ray)
• The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962 – Vincente Minnelli) mixed (cable)

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MAY 2011

Last Updated May 31, 2011

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• Together (2000 – Lukas Moodysson) pro(+) (DVD)
  
• Devils on the Doorstep (2000 – Wen Jiang) PRO(-) (DVD)
• The Way Back (2010 – Peter Weir) pro (DVD)
• The Great Waltz (1938 – Julien Duvivier) pro (cable)

While watching this often technically impressive pseudo Johann Strauss biography with all the MGM costume and set trimmings, my mind raced through references to other films and filmmakers of the era.  I recalled watching many years ago William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver and thinking how a number of shots, in my estimation, seemed Wellesian.  I initially attributed such look to Citizen Kane DP Gregg Toland who had worked with Wyler many times; but was slightly surprised to learn it was Joseph Ruttenberg behind the camera not Toland.  Well here watching The Great Waltz, released 3 years before Kane, I was again tweaked to thoughts of a Wellesian look and noted that it was Ruttenberg lensing the film for the great (underappreciated) French director Julian Duvivier, a filmmaker Orson Welles greatly admired. Then I thought of Duvivier’s Lydia (shot by Lee Garmes) and both its slight borrowings (?) from the Kane narrative structure (and, reportedly, Duvivier’s own Un carnet de bal), as well as and the Busby Berekely meets Max Ophuls like ballroom scene. Then, during the charming Tale of the Vienna Woods sequence, my mind turned to Mamoulian, Clair and Lubistch films of the early thirties and the films that borrowed from them like Von Sternberg’s The King Steps Out and Schertzinger’s One Night of Love. (both featuring (Miss) Grace Moore)  In turn I thought of Hollywood’s attempts to exploit opera stars like Moore, The Great Waltz coloratura soprano star Miliza Korjus and Mario Lanza (having recently seen Anthony Mann’s Lanza stinker Serenade which was a sanitized adaptation of James M. Cain novel.  It was Cain, by way of Mildred Pierce, that enlightened me as to what a coloratura was). Then, as the result of all this movie culture convergence, my film geek head exploded

• The Way of the Gun (2000 – Chirstopher McQuarrie) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Faithless (2000 – Liv Ullmann) pro (DVD)
  
• Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000 – Anh Hung Tran) pro (DVD)
• I Died a Thousand Times (1955 – Stuart Heisler) mixed (cable)

A quick survey of commentators weighing in on this genre effort and one finds plenty of curt dismissals – based largely on the fact that remaking Raoul Walsh’s classic Humphrey Bogart coming out party High Sierra is somehow “unnecessary”.  Well it certainly didn’t stop Walsh and Warner Bros. from successfully reworking High Sierra with Western trimmings with the admirable Colorado Territory; so why wouldn’t the studio go back to the well for another try, this time in Warner Color and Cinemascope.  While there’s really no interesting story or character revisions from the W.R. Burnett/John Huston original you certainly have to give the film credit for its dynamic look – which just pops with color in a way that’s suggestive of better and more memorable colorful ‘scope efforts from 1955 like East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, Violent Saturday, Bad Day at Black Rock, Picnic, The Man from Laramie, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing and House of Bamboo.  Director of photography Ted McCord on a number of occasions employing the ultra expressive canted angles (Dutch tilts*) he used in East of Eden (perhaps McCord’s stylistic idea and not Elia Kazan’s?).  Jack Palance and Shelley Winters are no Bogie and Ida Lupino but at least they dialed down their over the top emoting from The Big Knife, a film released mere weeks earlier.  [*There’s quite a number of Dutch tilts in the recently released Thor – not sure if Kenneth Branagh was channeling Welles or sixties television Batman – maybe both given the Shakespeare meets comic book concept.]

• Mysterious Object at Noon (2000 – Apichatpong Weerasethakul) mixed (DVD)
• Thor (2011 – Kenneth Branagh) mixed(-) (Theater)
• Dora-heita (2000 – Kon Ichikawa) pro (DVD)
  
• Fair Game (2010 – Doug Liman) pro(-) (Blu-Ray)
  
• Green Mansions (1959 – Mel Ferrer) con (cable)
  
• Four Lions (2010 – Christopher Morris) pro (Blu-Ray)
  
• Father’s Little Dividend (1951 – Vincente Minnelli) mixed (cable)
• Flesh (1932 – John Ford) pro(-) (cable)
  
• Such Good Friends (1971 – Otto Preminger) mixed (DVD)
• You’re a Big Boy Now (1966 – Francis Ford Coppola) mixed(-) (DVD-R)
• How Do You Know (2010- James L. Brooks) mixed (Blu-Ray)
  
• Serenade (1956 – Anthony Mann) mixed(-) (cable)
  
• Araya (1959 – Margot Benacerraf) pro(-) (DVD)

While watching this picturesque Cannes winning documentary (sharing the big prize with the now canonical Hiroshima Mon Amour) about the hardscrabble life of isolated Venezuelan salt miners/fishermen my mind raced to thoughts of both other films with realist objectives and the very nature of documentary filmmaking.  I thought of the raw and ragged portrayal of the fishing village in the neo-realist classic La Terra Trema, and the staged/faux/pseudo documentary elements of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and Louisiana Story, Kent Mackenzie’s Bunker Hill set The Exiles and the more recent Mexican film Alamar.  Films where a certain primitive simplicity is sometimes made beautiful, and other times revealed as unforgiving.  Araya offers a highly lyrical presentation of a people enslaved to their very survival, people with barely discernable individual personalities fated to a paradoxically beautiful yet Sisyphean hell.  If, as the proverb goes, one is to make hay while the sun shines – what does one do if the sun shines every day from now to eternity?  Embrace a life of toil?  Considering Steven Soderbergh’s DVD cover pull quote which references the film’s “hypnotic combination of beauty and hardship”, one is left to confront where the line between celebration and indictment lay.  What would, for instance, Luis Bũnuel think? Surely his darkly brilliant prank of a film Land Without Bread is instructive.  In true hands off fashion director Benacerraf offers her audience little if any such instruction.

• Marwencol (2010 – Jeff Malmberg) pro (DVD)
  
• The Next Three Days (2010 – Paul Haggis) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Spencer’s Mountain (1963 – Delmer Daves) mixed(-) (cable)
• All Night Long (1962 – Basil Dearden) pro(-) (DVD)
• Love and Other Drugs (2010 – Edward Zwick) con (Blu-Ray)
• They Made Me a Fugitive (1947 – Alberto Cavalcanti) pro (cable)
• Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: 2  1/2 (2005 – William Greaves) mixed(-) (DVD)
• Susan Slade (1961 – Delmer Daves) mixed (cable)
• Vincere (2009 – Marco Bellocchio) pro(-) (DVD)
• Smilin’ Through (1932 – Sidney Franklin) pro(+) (cable)
• Zigeunerweisen (1980 – Seijun Suzuki) mixed (DVD)
• History is Made at Night (1937 – Frank Borzage) pro(+) (on-line)

APRIL 2011

Last Updated May 2, 2011 

• Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968 – William Greaves) pro(-) (DVD)
• Dogtooth (2009 – Giorgos Lanthimos) pro(+) (DVD)
• The Freshman (1925 – Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor) pro(+) (cable)
• Thunder on the Hill (1951 – Douglas Sirk) pro(-) (DVD)
• Girl Shy (1924 – Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor) pro(+) (cable)
• Alamar (2009 – Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio) pro (DVD)
• Spider (2002 – David Cronenberg) pro (DVD)
• Salt (2010 – Phillip Noyce) mixed (cable)
• No Blood Relation (1932 – Mikio Naruse) pro(-) (DVD)
• Escape from Fort Bravo (1953 – John Sturges) pro (DVD)
• The Secret of the Urn (1966 – Hideo Gosha) pro (DVD)
• Hanna (2011 – Joe Wright) pro (Theater)
• Rope of Sand (1949 – William Dieterle) pro(-) (DVD)
• Around a Small Mountain (2009 – Jacques Rivette) mixed (DVD)
• Parrish (1961 – Delmer Daves) mixed (cable)
• White Material (2009 – Claire Denis) pro(+) (Blu-Ray)
• Hereafter (2010 – Clint Eastwood) mixed (DVD)
• Payment on Demand (1951 – Curtis Bernhardt) pro(-) (DVD-R)
• Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945 – Roy Rowland) pro (cable)
• Run Silent Run Deep (1958 – Robert Wise) pro(-) (cable)
• The Pirate (1948 – Vincente Minnelli) mixed(+) (cable)
• Somewhere (2010 – Sofia Coppola) mixed (Blu-Ray)
• Open Hearts (2002 – Susanne Bier) pro(-) (DVD)
• Everyone Else (2010 – Maren Ade) pro(+) (DVD)
• The Piano Teacher (2001 – Michael Haneke) pro (DVD)
• Demonlover (2002 – Olivier Assayas) mixed (DVD)
• The Other Guys (2010 – Adam McKay) mixed(+) (cable)
• Viva Maria! (1965 – Louis Malle) pro(-) (cable)
• The Mikado (1939 – Victor Schertzinger) pro(-) (DVD)
• Trapeze (1956 – Carol Reed) pro(-) (cable)
• The Spanish Main (1945 – Frank Borzage) mixed (cable)
• I Am Love (2009 – Luca Guadagnino) pro(-) (DVD)
• Monte Walsh (1970 – William A. Fraker) mixed(+) (cable)
• Unstoppable (2010 – Tony Scott) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Easy A (2010 – Will Gluck) mixed(+) (DVD)

Last Updated March  31, 2011

• Enchanted April (1992 – Mike Newell) pro(-) (cable)
• The Four Days of Naples (1962 – Nanni Loy) pro (cable)

A resistance “combat” film set in the waning days of WW2 as Germany attempts to occupy Naples and is confronted by steadfast rebellion from all walks of the Neapolitan citizenry from man to woman to child.  Loosely suggests a type of docurealism but the often meticulous formal technique doesn’t exactly convey raggedness and grit, it’s ultimately a far more slick and “professional” looking film than, say, Italian resistance standard bearer Open City (as was, I suppose Roberto Rossellini’s own WW2 Rome set resistance film Era notte a Roma (aka Escape by Night) from a few years earlier).  An urgent and emotional film where the individual is diluted, it’s the populace en masse that is the central character (despite some familiar faces to movie buffs today like Lea Massari (L’Avventura & Murmur of the Heart), Gian Maria Volonte (A Fistful of Dollars), Jean Sorel (Belle de Jour) and Frank Wolff (Once Upon a Time in the West).  The non-character driven approach suggests the work of the period of Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano in particular), the earlier French resistance film The Battle of the Rails or even the later Italian effort The Night of the Shooting Stars. Fittingly, the director of photography Marcello Gatti would go on to shoot the iconic resistance The Battle of Algiers – a truer stab at docurealism. The Four Days of Naples was an Oscar nominee in both the foreign film and original screenplay categories.

• Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) (2010 – John Scheinfeld) pro (DVD)
• Never Let Me Go (2010 – Mark Romanek) pro(-) (Blu-Ray)
• Four in a Jeep (1951 – Leopold Lindtberg) mixed (DVD)
• Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave (1973 – Alexander Kluge) pro (DVD)
• Antichrist (2009 – Lars Von Trier) mixed (DVD)
• I Clowns (1970 – Federico Fellini) mixed(+) (DVD)
• The Messenger (2009 – Oren Moverman) pro(-) (cable)
• Enter the Void (2009 – Gaspar Noe) mixed (DVD)
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2009 – Daniel Alfredson) con(+) (DVD)
• WUSA (1970 -Stuart Rosenberg) con (DVD)
• You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010 – Woody Allen) mixed(+) (Blu-Ray)
• Smart Woman (1931 – Gregory La Cava) mixed (cable)
• The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962 – Robert Bresson) pro (cable)
• The Half Naked Truth (1932 – Gregory La Cava) PRO(-) (cable)
• Safe in Hell (1931 – William Wellman) pro(+) (cable)
• The King Steps Out (1936 – Josef von Sternberg) pro(-) (cable)

After recently watching Billy Wilder’s rather futile attempt at getting his Ernst Lubitsch on with the Austrian set musical comedy romance The Emperor Waltz (he would do far better at Lubitsch with the non-musical Love in the Afternoon), I tried another like spirited minor film from a major director, Von Sternberg’s Austrian set musical comedy romance The King Steps Out.  Von Sternberg’s post Marlene Dietrich period is as hit and miss as they come and this film has little if any reputation.  Perhaps it was low expectations but I found this film to be a fairly charming and entertaining – a more than passable Lubitsch facsimile.  The musical numbers aren’t particularly memorable but opera diva turned part time movie star “Miss” Grace Moore (her career limited to nine films all from the 30s, I know her from her Oscar nominated performance in One Night of Love) pulls off her flirting and singing with aplomb.  Walter Connolly provides winning comic relief as a beer loving Duke. A more than passable Franchot Tone, as (the mostly in cognito) Emperor Franz Josef,  is the love interest.

• The League of Gentlemen (1960 – Basil Dearden) pro (DVD)
• The Honey Pot (1967 – Joseph L. Mankiewicz) mixed(+) (cable)
• The Shopworn Angel (1938 – H.C. Potter) pro (cable)
• Get Him to the Greek (2010 – Nicholas Stoller) mixed (cable)
• Term of Trial (1962 – Peter Glenville) mixed(+) (cable)
• They Made Me Criminal (1939 – Busby Berkeley) mixed(+) (cable)

As far as John Garfield boxing themed movies go, this ain’t no Body and Soul. Here Garfield’s a depression era fugitive (no angel by any stretch, though innocent of the murder he’s being sought for) but it’s played with a lot less urgency and desperation than he would show as a fugitive in Dust be My Destiny from the same year or in his excellent premature swan song He Ran All the Way (1951).  In support are the ever familiar Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys whose delinquent sassing and hijinks grate on me even in their best supporting roles like those in Dead End or Angels with Dirty Faces.  In this film the kids are somewhat implausibly transported from the gritty urban environs of NYC to an Arizona fruit farm – stick-ballers turned migrant workers without moral support from a Pat O’Brien styled Parish Priest or a Ma Joad type.  In the end Garfield’s character enters the boxing ring for a type of redemption, even winning over the copper who tails him (Claude Rains).  Overall a fairly entertaining and propulsive film that bears little resemblance to Berekely’s earlier Warner Bros. work in urbane and ambitious musicals

• The Emperor Waltz (1948 – Billy Wilder) mixed(-) (cable)
• Mädchen in Uniform (1931 – Leontine Sagan) pro(+) (on-line)
• I’ll Be Seeing You (1944 – William Dieterle) pro (DVD)
• Silkwood (1983 – Mike Nichols) pro (cable)
• Strange Days (1995 – Kathryn Bigelow) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Dark Command (1940 – Raoul Walsh) pro(-) (DVD)

FEBRUARY 2011

Last Updated February 28, 2011

• A Midnight Clear (1992 – Keith Gordon) pro(+) (DVD)
• The Twilight Samurai (2002 – Yoji Yamada) pro(+) (DVD)
• Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927 – Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack) pro (cable)
• Animal Kingdom (2010 – David Michôd) pro (DVD)
• Backfire (1950 – Vinent Sherman) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Five Star Final (1931 – Mervyn LeRoy) pro (cable)
• Kid Galahad (1937 – Michael Curtiz) pro (DVD)
• Black River (1957 – Masaki Kobayashi) pro(-) (on-line)
• MacGruber (2010 – Jorma Taccone) con (cable)
• The Crucified Lovers (1954 – Kenji Mizoguchi) pro(+) (on-line)
• Fantastic Planet (1973 – Rene Laloux) pro (DVD)
• 4 Little Girls (1997 – Spike Lee) pro (cable)
• Page Miss Glory (1935 – Mervyn LeRoy) pro(-) (cable)
• The Fourth Man (1983 – Paul Verhoeven) pro(-) (DVD)
• The End of the Affair (1999 – Neil Jordan) pro (DVD)
• La Habanera (1937 – Douglas Sirk) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Sapphire (1959 – Basil Dearden) pro(-) (DVD)
• Drôle de drame (1937 – Marcel Carne) pro (DVD)
• Another Year (2010 – Mike Leigh) PRO(-) (Theater)
• I’m Still Here (2010 – Casey Affleck) mixed(-) (cable)
• Soldier of Orange (1977 – Paul Verhoeven) pro (DVD)
• The Hanging Tree (1959 – Delmer Daves) pro(+) (cable)
• Mother Night (1996 – Keith Gordon) pro (DVD)
• Desert Fury (1947 – Lewis Allen) mixed (on-line)
• Spanglish (2004 – James L. Brooks) mixed (DVD)
• The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959 – Nobuo Nakagawa) pro (cable)
• Farewell, My Lovely (1975 – Dick Richards) mixed (on-line)
• The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978 – Eagle Pennell) pro (DVD)
• Splice (2009 – Vincenzo Natali) mixed(+) (cable)
• The Subject Was Roses (1968 – Ulu Grosbard) pro(-) (cable)
• The Woman in Blue (1973 – Michel Deville) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Payday (1973 - Daryl Duke) pro(+) (DVD)
• Cat’s Play (Macskajáték) (1972 – Károly Makk) pro (DVD)

JANUARY 2011

Last Updated February 3, 2011

• The Man in the Moon (1991 – Robert Mulligan) pro(-) (DVD)
• A Modern Hero (1934 – G.W. Pabst) mixed(+) (cable)
• 127 Hours (2010 – Danny Boyle) pro (Theater)
• The Cameraman (1928 – Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton) pro(+) (cable)
• Electra (1962 – Michael Cacoyannis) pro (DVD)
• At Long Last Love (1975 – Peter Bogdanovich) con(+) (on-line)

An unfairly maligned one time bomb deserving of reevaluation and rehabilitation; or simply one of the worst films of all time (it’s included in the book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (And How They Got That Way*)? The truth of the matter lies, as it almost always does, somewhere in between.  Though likely inspired by the Ernst Lubitsch musicals of the 30s (the director is a big fan of The Merry Widow); I found the homage happy Bogdanovich to still be in the mode of Howard Hawks (as he was with his earlier hit What’s Up, Doc?) in that the material strains for that “hanging out” vibe.  One of those films with an ensemble cast where the trifling plot is secondary and casual digressions from characters are encouraged.  None of it really works in this case as a good portion of the Cole Porter song book gets butchered by what passes for the director’s stock company (and I can’t see how the film’s direct recording conceit (the musical numbers are non-lip synched)  would be entirely to blame).  Eileen Brennan as a crass and sassy maid is kind of fun and I’m not generally averse to the idea of a non-polished attempts at musicals (didn’t mind Woody Allen‘s Everyone Says I Love You for instance) but I’m not ready to anoint this film with misunderstood “sleeper” status solely on the basis of its general unavailability on home video.  For me the underappreciated Bogdanovich 70s bomb remains Nickelodeon (black and white version).  If you simply must see a Burt Reynolds musical – stick with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, at least Dolly can sing.  [* but then again the book also includes Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Ivan the Terrible to note just two films with more than a few credible supporters]

• The Leather Boys (1964 – Sidney J. Furie) pro(-) (DVD)

Part of me was admiring Rita Tushingham’s transformation from the shy and plain pregnant teen in A Taste of Honey to the far more brash and obnoxious teenage newlywed in The Leather Boys – the other part couldn’t shake singular critic Manny Farber’s pitiless takedown of Tushingham’s acting style in his article “Pish-Tush”.  Farber also had the knives out for icons Jeanne Moreau (I’m a fan but he had a point) and Giulietta Masina (now that’s just uncalled for) in the same piece; but its poor old Rita the gets name checked the most.  Lovely Rita aside, I think this British new wave kitchen sink/angry young man effort with its marriage is a soul crushing trap theme (ala A Kind of Loving – a lust cautionary tale if there ever was one) succeeds largely because the key homosexual element (friendship as de facto marriage with doses of repressed sexual urges) is told with great sensitivity and with what then passed for cinematic realism.  Despite the once taboo subject matter (the film was made shortly after Basil Dearden’s gay themed Victim and then sat on the shelf for a year or two) the film never comes across as a message movie or provocation.  A great deal of that credit should go to the nuanced performances of lead actors Colin Campbell and Dudley Sutton.

• The Brother from Another Planet (1984 – John Sayles) pro(-) (cable)
• Love at the Top (Le mouton enragé) (1974 – Michel Deville) pro (DVD)

Gotta love the marketing department of the distributor of this film to English speaking countries, the generic English title is one hell of a misrepresentation.  How Le mouton enragé (The Angry Sheep) becomes Love at the Top is a matter best justified by the bean counters I guess.  I went in knowing very little about this film other than the attractive cast (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Romy Schneider & Jane Birkin), expecting, at best, an adult drama or romance in the style of a Claude Sautet, Eric Rohmer or Claude Lelouch film.  Instead I found a rather dark and subversive comedy in the spirit of satirists and provocateurs of the period like Luis Buñuel, Bertrand Blier, and Marco Ferreri.  I loved every strange minute of this film which is anti-conformist with a “be careful what you wish for” twist.   Look forward to tracking down more of the director’s work.

• The Keys of the Kingdom (1944 – John Stahl) mixed (cable)
• Love (1971 – Karoly Makk) PRO(-) (DVD)
• King & Country (1964 – Joseph Losey) mixed(+) (DVD)
• The Silent Partner (1978 – Daryl Duke) pro (DVD)
• The Crooked Way (1949 – Robert Florey) mixed (cable)
• A High Wind in Jamaica (1965 – Alexander Mackendrick) pro (DVD)
• City Streets (1931 – Rouben Mamoulian) pro(+) (cable)

When I saw and fell in love with Mamoulian’s masterpiece Love Me Tonight years ago I decided that in no way could it simply be a mere knock off of the highly similar Ernst Lubitsch Paramount musicals of the period.  Mamoulian simply must be some sort of auteur and genius.  Chasing that film buff buzz I sought out more Mamoulian films; but after various viewings of his later work (The Gay Desperado, Golden Boy, The Mark of Zorro, Silk Stockings) I was generally left unsatisfied.  There were hints in the less than perfect We Live Again (the Easter ceremony in particular) and surely Queen Christina is a great film but on the whole the search took the wind out of my sails.  Now, after recently seeing Applause and City Streets, two films which prove that early sound films need not be static, stage bound or merely functional, I realize that I should have worked backwards from Love Me Tonight not forwards.  Along with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde I’m left with the impression that Mamoulian may have had one of the best first four film runs of any Hollywood director.

• Possession (1981 – Andrzej Zulawski) pro (DVD)
• Full Moon in Paris (1984 – Eric Rohmer) pro (DVD)
• Moonlighting (1982 – Jerzy Skolimowski) pro(+) (DVD)
• The Unknown (1927 – Tod Browning) pro(+) (on-line)

Critic David Thomson’s imaginary alternate version of the plot of The Unknown set out in his book Have You Seen…?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films is compelling – offering perhaps a more interesting psychological tact the story may have taken – but the film as it is seems pretty perfect to me.  A straight forward, economical, emotional and exciting film.  More focused and elemental than Browning’s later circus set silent The Show.  Lon Chaney at is masochistic best and young Joan Crawford shows off a vulnerability and sex appeal largely absent from her later better known sound films (her strengths would lie elsewhere).  Nice to see that the strong man played by Norman Kerry was spared the Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hitcher gruesome ending.

• The Lady with the Dog (1960 – Iosif Kheifits) pro(+) (DVD)
• What’s Up, Doc? (1972 – Peter Bogdanovich) pro (DVD)
• Applause (1929 – Rouben Mamoulian) pro(+) (DVD)
• I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968 – Hy Averback) mixed (cable)
• Head (1968 – Bob Rafelson) pro (Blu-Ray)
• Three Came Home (1950 – Jean Negulesco) pro(-) (cable)
• Lydia (1941 – Julien Duvivier) pro(-) (on-line)

Note to self – seek out Duvivier’s earlier and reportedly highly similar but far better film Un carnet de bal because Lydia certainly suggests the potential for greater things.  This episodic Alexander Korda produced Merle Oberon vehicle is deliberately segmented to tell the story of a life from the vestiges of an aged woman’s memory and the memories of her thwarted (but still admiring) suitors.   It has a sort of Citizen Kane like structure but with much of that film’s gravity or urgency absent (plus the Kane connection is worth noting as Joseph Cotten has a key role in Lydia and Welles was an admirer of Duvivier’s work).  While there are scenes of great lyricism and technical brilliance (with one ball room segment featuring a recollection enhanced by fantasy that’s suggestive of Busby Berkeley) it’s a very uneven film – struggling to move from whimsy to tragedy and back again, all of which undermines the impact of what is intended to be the most bittersweet of endings (a finale in a sort of Letter from an Unknown Woman vein). Oberon is lovely as the young heroine; but her ultra phony sounding old lady voice drove me up the wall.

• Pot o’ Gold (1941 – George Marshall) mixed(+) (cable)
• Wife for a Night (1952 – Mario Camerini) pro (cable)

About 20 minutes into this period Italian comedy it dawned on me – this material is just like Kiss Me, Stupid.  Quick IMDB search later and lo and behold, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s 1964 sex farce is indeed based on the same Italian play (Anna Bonacci’s L’Ora della Fantasia) (Kiss Me, Stupid was a critical and box-office failure in its day though its reputation, rightfully I’d argue, has been somewhat rehabilitated). Wife for a Night comes across far more sweet than the occasionally crass and smutty seeming Kiss Me, Stupid. The film is a vehicle for the ever sexy Gina Lollobrigida who is far more demure here than in her fiery performances in other films of the period like Fanfan la Tulip and Bread, Love and Dreams.  One might think Lollobrigida would be a natural for the hired “wife”/courtesan role (Kim Novak’s role in the Wilder film (subbing for an originally hoped for Marilyn Monroe) but she’s a winner in the real wife role (played by an excellent Felica Farr in the Wilder film).  A fun comedy worth seeing (with thanks to TCM).

• Children in the Wind (1937 – Hiroshi Shimizu) pro(-) (on-line)
• Soul Kitchen (2009 – Fatih Akin) pro(-) (DVD)
• The American (2010 – Anton Corbijn) mixed (DVD)
• Cyrus (2010 – Jay & Mark Duplass) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Sinful Davey (1969 – John Huston) con (cable)

The deeper I dive into the “obscurities” in John Huston’s filmography the more unsatisfying his uneven career seems.  Not particularly shocking if you are going to seek out critical and commercial failures in some misguided aim at completeness. While I was never a huge fan of Tony Richardson’s new wave tinged take on Tom Jones, that hit is ten times the film of this like spirited semi-comic picaresque bore.  The lovely Pamela Franklin, so winning in her prior film from the same year The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is wasted here as John Hurt’s character’s love interest and moral compass. Apparently Huston butted heads with producer Walter Mirisch while shooting and in post production editing (or lack thereof), but I can’t imagine the film improving much absent such friction. At least the location work in Ireland (as Scotland) is pretty.

• Sound of the Mountain (1954 – Mikio Naruse) pro (on-line)
• Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010 - Banksy) pro (DVD)
• The Kids Are All Right (2010 – Lisa Cholodenko) pro (DVD)
• The King’s Speech (2010 – Tom Hooper) pro(+) (Theater)
• Hot Tub Time Machine (2010 – Steve Pink) mixed(-) (cable)
• A Wife’s Heart (1956 – Mikio Naruse) pro (DVD-R)

 Last Updated: January 1, 2011

• Drive a Crooked Road (1954 – Richard Quine) pro(-) (cable)
• Liebelei (1933 – Max Ophuls) pro (on-line)
• Drive, He Said (1971 – Jack Nicholson) mixed (Blu-Ray)
• A Hole in the Head (1959 – Frank Capra) mixed(-) (cable)
• Me and Orson Welles (2008 – Richard Linklater) mixed(+) (cable)
• The Fighter (2010 – David O. Russell) pro (+) (Theater)
• True Grit (2010 – Joel & Ethan Coen) PRO(-) (Theater)
• True Grit (1969 – Henry Hathaway) pro(-) (cable)
• Bitter End of a Sweet Night (1961 – Yoshishige Yoshida) pro (on-line)
• The Only Game in Town (1970 – George Stevens) con (on-line)
• Alex in Wonderland (1970 – Paul Mazursky) con(+) (cable)
•  Vernon, Florida (1981 – Errol Morris) pro (DVD)
• The Suspect (1944 – Robert Siodmak) pro (on-line)
• The Thin Blue Line (1988 – Errol Morris) pro(+) (DVD)
• The Out-of-Towners (1970 – Arthur Hiller) pro (cable)

This one joke film – a sort of whatever can go wrong will go wrong story of urban dread – is surprisingly dark for its mainstream pedigree (Arthur Hiller, Neil Simon, Jack Lemmon) and, if you’re properly disposed, funny and effective.  You won’t find many actors with less quirks, tics or mannerisms than the two leads here, those love ‘em or hate ‘em audience dividers Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis (playing the fish out of water couple from Twin Oaks, Ohio), but they worked for me (Ms. Dennis offered a surprising comforting ease that diluted Lemmon’s frantic neurotic grandstanding).  Unlike more current comedic takes on NYC outsider angst like Date Night with its slightly more preposterous situations, the circumstances here are at least grounded in a type of reality, what with the muggings, garbage and transit strikes, hotel reservation fiascos, airport delays and missing baggage.  While hardly subversive I was surprised to find The Out-of-Towners to be somewhat in the sprit to urban critique black comedies of the era like Little Murders or warmer and fuzzier urban (counter)culture shock offerings like The Landlord. Must admit I’ve always equated director Hiller with a certain type of underachieving bland commercial product, but perhaps I should reassess – certainly the strong current of cynicism exhibited in Hiller’s other Neil Simon scripted films Plaza Suite and the downbeat The Lonely Guy, his  Paddy Chayefsky scripted films The Americanization of Emily and The Hospital (or even the non-Chayefsky Chayefsky-esque (unsuccessful) institutional satire Teachers), and the offbeat and riotous The In-Laws all produce more than just a little edge.

• Winter’s Bone (2010 – Debra Granik) pro (Blu-Ray)
• Inside Daisy Clover (1965 – Robert Mulligan) mixed(-) (cable)
• Gates of Heaven (1978 – Errol Morris) pro(+) (DVD)
• Smart Money (1931 – Alfred E. Green) pro(-) (DVD)
• Saddle the Wind (1958 – Robert Parrish) pro (DVD)
• Cousin, Cousine (1975 – Jean Charles Tacchella) pro (on-line)
• The Getaway (1972 – Sam Peckinpah) pro (DVD)
• Turkish Delight (1973 – Paul Verhoeven) pro (DVD)
• Susan Slept Here (1954 – Frank Tashlin) mixed(+) (cable)
• The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009 – Daniel Alfredson) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Black Friday (1940 – Arthur Lubin) pro(-) (DVD)

The story is never even remotely plausible (“brain transplantation”!) but this film is generally fun and compelling. Easily the most surprising thing about Black Friday is that Universal horror top of the bill icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi are completely upstaged by prolific character actor Stanley Ridges in the key Jekyll and Hyde-ish duo role.  A little research into the production history reveals rumors that the three key roles were originally to be shuffled between the three actors with Karloff taking the Ridges part and Lugosi the Karloff part.  Nevertheless Ridges moves with great ease from playing a meek and kindly literature Professor names Kingsley to a man possessed by the spirit of a ruthless but deceased gangster colorfully named Red Cannon.  The plot is not so much The Hands of Orloc (hands of a knife throwing murderer are surgically grafted onto a sensitive pianist) but rather the Brain of Orloc.  Despite the B budget Ridges’ good/bad act is on par with the earlier like spirited (though comic) performance by Edward G. Robinson as a humble clerk/vicious gangster in The Whole Town’s Talking, or later takes on good twin/evil twin by Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror or the schizoid mind by Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve.  Sadly the Lugosi role as a gangster is rather muted and abbreviated, plus he doesn’t share any scenes with regular co-star Karloff.

• Stranger on the Third Floor (1940 – Boris Ingster) pro (DVD-R)
• Cronos (1993 – Guillermo del Toro) pro(-) (DVD)
• Three Ages (1923 – Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline) pro (Blu-Ray)
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010 – Edgar Wright) pro (Blu-Ray)
• Head Against the Wall (1959 - Georges Franju) pro (on-line)
• House (1977 – Nobuhiko Obayashi) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988 – Terence Davies) pro(+) (on-line) 
• Kick-Ass (2010 – Matthew Vaughn) mixed(+) (cable)
• Young Man with a Horn (1950 – Michael Curtiz) pro(-) (cable)
• Louie Bluie (1985 – Terry Zwigoff) pro(+) (DVD)
• A Single Man (2009 – Tom Ford) mixed(-) (cable)
• Black Swan (2010 – Darren Aronofsky) pro (Theater)
• Sometimes a Great Notion (1971 – Paul Newman) pro(-) (on-line)
• A Christmas Carol (2009 – Robert Zemeckis) mixed (DVD)
• The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972 – John Huston) mixed (cable)

In 1972 those Hollywood heartthrobs Butch and Sundance each ended up in a John Milius scripted Western; Robert Redford got the moodier more conventionally measured piece Jeremiah Johnson and Paul Newman the sprawling ensemble picaresque The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.  In the year of one of John Huston’s best and most low key works Fat City he also gave audiences perhaps his most raggedy and off beat film since Beat the Devil.  In marketplace terms The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean comes from the period following the box office success of the Western spoof Cat Ballou, a time where the release of comic Westerns continued unabated, notwithstanding the status of The Wild Bunch as a genre game changer. Life and Times is a film that is often a broad farce strenuously mismatched with elegiac elements.  Is it a revisionist or deconstructionist Western? A parody or sentimental vaudevillian hogwash? It plays like a Burt Kennedy comic Western with the irreverent, subversive and artful shades of Jodorowsky’s El Topo; though ultimately it’s a film a lot closer in spirit to awkward Old Hollywood /New Hollywood stylistic blends like There Was a Crooked Man… and The Ballad of Cable Hogue than to, say, Little Big Man.  Parts are kooky and inspired such as Stacy Keach (no stranger to grotesque cameos in heavy make-up – see also Brewster McLeod) as an albino gunslinger named Bad Bob that gets a watermelon sized hole in his torso courtesy of a shotgun blast (anticipating a similarly cartoonish moment decades later in Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead).  Other parts are harder to take, like Newman and Victoria Principal with a beer drinking bear seemingly anticipating Clint Eastwood’s pairing with Clyde the orangutan or the head scratching Andy Williams sung anachronistic musical interlude (the Oscar nominated (!) “Marmalade, Molasses & Honey”) that actually makes one yearn for the “Old West” musical stylings of B.J. Thomas and “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head”.  Overall Newman’s fine as the titular hanging judge with the Lily Langtry (here Ava Gardner in a cameo) fixation; but given the choice I’ll stick with Walter Brennan’s take on Roy Bean in The Westerner. A few years later Newman would revisit this type of hodgepodge film with Robert Altman’s equally imperfect, but generally more interesting, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson.

NOVEMBER 2010

 Last Updated: December 1, 2010

• Kiss the Blood off My Hands (1948 – Norman Foster) mixed (on-line)
• A New Leaf (1971 – Elaine May) pro (on-line)
• The Killer Inside Me (2010 – Michael Winterbottom) mixed (Blu-Ray)
• Artists and Models (1955 – Frank Tashlin) pro(+) (on-line)
• Mother (2009 – Joon-Ho Bong) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Mädchen in Uniform (1958 – Géza von Radványi) mixed (DVD)
• The Runaways (2010 – Floria Sigismondi) mixed(-) (cable)
• The Savage Innocents (1960 – Nicholas Ray) pro (on-line)
• A Kind of Loving (1962 – John Schlesinger) pro (on-line)
• There’s Always Tomorrow (1934 – Edward Sloman) pro(-) (on-line)

During the fifties, for Ross Hunter and Universal Studios, Douglas Sirk directed 4 remakes of Universal produced and distributed melodramas from the 1930s.  Three of the originals (Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life and When Tomorrow Comes (which would be titled Interlude for Sirk)) were directed by admired melodrama stalwart John M. Stahl, the fourth, There’s Always Tomorrow (sometimes known as Too Late for Love), the most obscure and perhaps weak sister reputation wise, was directed by Edward Sloman then a Hollywood veteran at the tail end of a rather prolific career.  This original version of There’s Always Tomorrow, adapted from an Ursula Parrott novel, shares, if not every specific plot point, a similarity in theme and spirit with the exceptional Sirk version of the story.  It’s a man’s women’s picture, a story of an unappreciated model citizen, husband and father named Joseph White who upon being relegated to the sole role of family breadwinner drifts into the temptation of an affair with a never married old love/business colleague.  Here the selfless forgotten man is expertly and gently played by Frank Morgan who nearly matches Fred MacMurray’s equally sensitive and nuanced portrayal of the character in the 1956 version.  It’s Morgan’s picture all the way to the point that his absence from a scene feels like a drag on the narrative.  The story almost derails in the Morgan free mid-portion focus on the indignant children (who include Robert Taylor in an early rather stiff performance) and their investigation of what they believe to be an illicit affair conducted weekly during their Dad’s lodge night.  In fact the affair is little more than a series of chaste brief encounters, though hardly truly innocent, while the affair is unconsummated physically there is clearly emotional infidelity in the works.  Yet, what makes the platonic affair poignant is that Joseph White ultimately deserves the happiness it brings.  The object of Joseph White’s yearning is Alice Vail played by Binnie Barnes a British actress then making the transition from Alexander Korda productions and the like to Hollywood.  While Barnes plays Alice Vail with sophistication and dignity she’s no match for Morgan, her performance, while passable, is leaden down with a theatrical formality that’s almost oppressive in its lack of everyday humanity and warmness, qualities which are key to such a plebian bittersweet romance.  As with the 1956 version the wife figure is never truly vilified though the character (her played by Lois Wilson) is given rather short shrift. Not a great film but of interest – see it for the ever amiable Frank Morgan.  Point of trivia Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West) has a small part as Morgan’s (Oz’s Wizard) maid.

• It (1927 – Clarence G. Badger) pro (cable)
• Fat Girl (2001 – Catherine Breillat) con (DVD)
• John and Mary (1969 – Peter Yates) pro (DVD)
• Carson City (1952 – Andre De Toth) pro (cable)
• Limbo (1999 – John Sayles) pro(+) (DVD)
• Safety Last! (1923 – Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor) pro(+) (cable)
• Arise, My Love (1940 – Mitchell Leisen) pro (on-line)
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009 – Niels Arden Oplev) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Alias Nick Beal (1949 – John Farrow) pro (on-line)
• Lessons of Darkness (Werner Herzog) pro (DVD)
• Show People (1928 – King Vidor) pro (cable)

An exceedingly likeable film business satiric comedy stuffed with high profile cameos (Chaplin, Fairbanks, Talmadge, John Gilbert etc.) and plenty of insider elements (The Player of the Jazz Age?).  Though the story about the transformation of a low brow comedic actress named Peggy Pepper into a prestige project capital D dramatic actress amusingly renamed Patricia Peppoire by High Art Studios is meant to mirror / comment on / lampoon the career trajectory of silent screen siren Gloria Swanson (with more than just a dash of comment on the career of the film’s star Marion Davies as well); I couldn’t help but note a thematic kinship with Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels.  In Sturges’ beloved film the director John Sullivan learns that his aspirations to move from pie in the face escapist comedy (“Ants in Your Pants of 1939”) to dramatic social problem films (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”) are misguided, a failure to recognize his true strengths and the broader cultural value his “lighter” films bring.  Show People is more spoof like, lacking the more self-reflexive and complex narrative tension of Sullivan’s Travels but the end game message (or anti-message) is the same – laughter is the best medicine, be who you are. Despite the best of intentions an actress cannot merely will prestigious diva-dom upon herself – someone has to work for Mack Sennett, they all can’t work for Cecil B. Demille.  An overarching theme that suggested shades of Clara Manni as played by Lucia Bosè in Antonioni’s The Lady Without Camelias or Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain.  Marion Davies is as winning in her facial contorting mugging in Show People (one minute she suggests Theda Bara the next Lillian Gish) as she was in that other great 1928 King Vidor comedy romp – The Patsy.  Vidor even appears as himself toward the end directing a WW1 film with Davies’ Patricia Peppoire wearing an outfit more than just a little suggestive of Renée Adorée in the earlier Vidor dramatic blockbuster The Big Parade.  Comedy still doesn’t get much respect though, and I’m just as guilty of the next guy; despite the greatness of The Patsy and Show People when prompted to name the best King Vidor movie from 1928, I’d still go with the “serious drama” The Crowd.

• The Blob (1958 – Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.) mixed(+) (cable)
• Something to Live For (1952 – George Stevens) pro (on-line)
• Hearts and Minds (1974 – Peter Davis) PRO (cable)
• Hold Back the Dawn (1941 – Mitchell Leisen) pro (on-line)
• Wild Grass (2009 – Alain Resnais) pro (DVD)
• Hitler’s Madman (1943 – Douglas Sirk) pro (cable)

A B minus film produced by poverty row’s PRC that MGM had the good sense to commandeer, distribute and, in effect, elevate to B+ release territory.  As with Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die released the same year, the story in this resistance focused WW2 film centers on the planned assassination of diabolical Nazi big wig Reinhardt “Hangman” Heydrich (here played by John Carradine with his usual scenery chewing gusto).  An assassination that would trigger the Gestapo’s infamous massacre of the male townspeople of Lidice, Czechoslovakia.  As a recent German émigré to America (along with his Jewish wife) director Douglas Sirk certainly had some skin in the propaganda game and it shows in this robust effort (as did fellow European (uncredited) contributors Edgar Ulmer and Eugene Schufftan).  Not quite at the quality of the great and like spirited None Shall Escape, the modestly budgeted Nazi atrocities propaganda film from Columbia released the following year; but certainly amongst the best of the notable 1943 non-combat Nazi resistance themed films which in addition to Lang’s Hangmen Also Die include the Canadian set Northern Pursuit, the stagy Watch on the Rhine, the lyrical Renoir helmed This Land is Mine, the slick and dynamic Edge of Darkness and the minor Hitler’s Children. The acting doesn’t always come through, but the films grit, vigor and inspirational earnestness are undeniable all delivered with a narrative urgency absent from the significantly longer and more deliberately paced Hangmen Also Die. The first film in Sirk’s memorable Hollywood career – though the merits of his later most admired films would be quite different than those of this film.

• An Unmarried Woman (1978 – Paul Mazursky) pro(-) (DVD)
• Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010 – Apichatpong Weerasethakul) pro(+) (Theater)
• California (1947 – John Farrow) pro (DVD)

Enjoyed this beautiful looking Technicolor Western a great deal, probably more than it deserves because with closer scrutiny it’s little more than formula stuff, a routine (though big budgeted) genre effort without a single original narrative idea.  But Farrow’s navigation of the camera (he’s a true master of the mobile long take) and the performances from the more than able actors (Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland & George Coulouris) give the familiar an air of freshness. Ostensibly a story about the settling and statehood of California, the sprawling backdrop with location shot scenes suggests epic, but it’s the set bound smaller character moments that ultimately work best.   I was skeptical of Milland’s ability to pull off a gruff war deserter wagon master type, with his icy urbane vibe Milland always seemed more comfortable in pinstripes than spurs (felt similarly about Robert Taylor in Westerns; but was won over by The Devil’s Doorway and Westward the Women), but he acquits himself well enough (some of his best work was for John Farrow including solid noirs The Big Clock and Alias Nick Beal).  Coulouris brings some interesting psychological shading to his villain character, a former ship’s Captain and slave trader turned corrupt town boss (with the name Pharaoh Coffin no less); there are moments when he actually borders on sympathetic. Talented character actor Barry Fitzgerald supports as a noble sod busting wanna be vintner cum grass roots politician, but anytime he’s not playing a priest, an Irish matchmaker or the like he seems miscast (The Naked City comes to mind).  Stanwyck, naturally, is the Machiavellian saloon girl with a heart of gold – aligned with Coulouris but, begrudgingly, with eyes for Milland.  She can do no wrong from where I sit; even when lip synching a couple of de rigueur musical numbers.

• Laugh and Get Rich (1931 – Gregory La Cava) mixed (cable)
• Mystery Train (1989 – Jim Jarmusch) pro (Blu-Ray)
• Ivy (1947 – Sam Wood) pro(-) (on-line)
• Micmacs (2009 – Jean-Pierre Jeunet) mixed (Blu-Ray)
• Hearts of the West (1975 – Howard Zieff) pro(-) (cable)
•  The Pearls of the Crown (1937 – Sacha Guitry) pro(-) (DVD)
• Secret Ceremony (1968 – Joseph Losey) mixed (cable)
• Please Give (2010 – Nicole Holofcener) pro (DVD)
• Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (1967 – Nagisa Oshima) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Dial 1119 (1950 – Gerald Meyer) pro(-) (DVD)
• Jeopardy (1953 – John Sturges) pro (cable)

A tight little thriller that might have worked just as well with an hour long television format.  A family vacation from hell story, that unfortunately reads a bit like a xenophobic cautionary tale (better stay at home because Mexico is dangerous).  In this case a family of three (Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan and Lee Aaker as the very young son) takes a road trip to the remote Baja Peninsula to set up at a deserted fishing camp. You know things are more than just a little off with Dad’s rustic R&R plan the minute you see the ominous dilapidated jetty on the verge of collapsing into the pitiless Pacific Ocean.  A piece of timber soon traps the Dad in the water and the tide begins to roll in (prefiguring the unforgettable Richard Jaeckel set piece in the 70s logging family melodrama Sometimes a Great Notion).  The race against the clock is on and Stanwyck, in the height of forgivable implausibility, is soon taken hostage by a desperate escaped con played by Ralph Meeker with his usual smirking sadistic gusto.  The film has the usual elements of a woman in distress noir / hostage drama but the Stanwyck / Meeker dynamic (sexual tension and all) elevates the material.  Stanwyck’s character is pure no-nonsense, sacrificial but decisive; just as comfortable improvising with a car jack in an attempt to save her hubby as she is in trying to either bludgeon her assailant or make sexual concessions – whatever it takes.  Great fun from the period where MGM diversified into the cheap and quick B movie space.

• Desperate Journey (1942 – Raoul Walsh) pro(-) (DVD)

OCTOBER 2010

 Last Updated: October 31, 2010

• Come on Children (1973 – Allan King) pro(-) (DVD)
• Thirst (2009 – Chan-Wook Park) pro (cable)
• Gentleman’s Fate (1931 – Mervyn Leroy) mixed (cable)
• The Last Sunset (1961 – Robert Aldrich) pro(-) (DVD)
• Night Tide (1961 – Curtis Harrington) mixed (cable)
• These Are the Damned (1963 – Joseph Losey) pro (cable)
• The Last Flight (1931 – William Dieterle) pro(+) (cable)
• The Town (2010 – Ben Affleck) pro (Theater)
• Pirate Radio (2009 – Richard Curtis) mixed(+) (cable)
• All Through the Night (1941 – Vincent Sherman) pro(-) (cable)
• Grown Ups (2010 – Denis Dugan) con(-) (DVD)
• Flight Command (1940 – Frank Borzage) mixed (cable)
• Has Anybody Seen My Gal (1952 – Douglas Sirk) pro(-) (DVD)
• Lightning (1952 – Mikio Naruse) PRO (DVD-R)
• Desperate Search (1952 – Joseph H. Lewis) mixed (DVD)
• Murder, He Says (1945 – George Marshall) pro (cable)
• Hideko, The Bus Conductress (1941 – Mikio Naruse) pro(-) (DVD-R)
• He Ran All the Way(1951 – John Berry) pro(+) (cable)

In some ways it’s kind of sad that the great John Garfield’s swan song was merely a 77 minute genre film with a small budget; but looking on the bright side it’s a very fine little film.  An economical noir that has a story that moves from a botched heist to a domestic hostage thriller.  Garfield plays a frantic and desperate cop killer on the run after an inept payroll robbery who worms his way into the dingy city apartment of a family of four by wooing the daughter at the local public pool.  Only the brooding but sensitive Garfield could turn such a terminal loser character into some sort of sympathetic rebellious anti-hero – even though his character’s fate, thanks to the Production Code, was sealed the moment that cop was shot.  Shelly Winters plays the vulnerable innocent daughter, nicely applying her ever effective trademark lovesick victim treatment.  As a hostage drama, He Ran All the Way anticipates later 50s films like Suddenly and The Desperate Hours where the captors seem to simultaneously yearn for, and resent, the captive family’s domestic tranquility, but in this case the family is less suburban and less than middle class giving the proceedings a little extra urban grit. The film’s climax is shot and edited with great aplomb (Berry and always aces DP James Wong Howe have a great eye for close-ups, extreme angles and depth of field), giving Garfield’s desperation and Winters’ decision between loyalty to family and the thrill of her bad boy crush incredible urgency.  While his character lay in the celluloid gutter, so did Garfield’s actual career thanks to HUAC.  Perhaps even if Garfield had survived his 1952 heart attack the blacklist had already ended his Hollywood career more or less (Clifford Odets attempt at a save notwithstanding); the HUAC witch-hunt certainly significantly derailed the careers of director Berry and the film’s screen writers Dalton Trumbo & Hugo Butler.  Overall I found this film to be a significant step up from Berry’s prior minor but entertaining noir Tension.

• Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968 – Nagisa Oshima) pro (DVD)
• A Married Couple (1969 – Allan King) pro(+) (DVD)
• The Lawless Breed (1953 – Raoul Walsh) mixed (DVD)
• Espion(s) (2009 – Nicolas Saada) mixed (DVD)
• Countdown (1968 – Robert Altman) pro(-) (cable)
• Deadline at Dawn (1946 – Harold Clurman) pro(-) (DVD)

In the early going while watching this highly entertaining RKO film noir scripted by Clifford Odets from a William Irish (Cornell Woolrich) story, I was ready to declare director Harold Clurman (a key Group Theater figure) the Charles Laughton of the 40s, that is, one directorial credit = one great film.  But, sadly, the film after a delightfully seedy and compelling start sort of loses its way, bogged down by the various pseudo poetic/philosophical musings of the rag tag night owls that populate a grimy back lot NYC.  As noir expert Eddie Muller noted in his excellent noir overview book “Dark City”: “the splintered frenzy of Woolrich’s novel was a poor match for artists as mannered as Odets and Clurman; they seemed to lose interest somewhere around 3 a.m.”.  Deadline at Dawn is in the mold of those episodic eccentric films that take place on the mean streets in the middle of the night (like Fox’s Somewhere in the Night from the same year or another Woolrich adaptation Phantom Lady) where red herrings and weird digressions abound against a backdrop of colorful supporting characters (included here is a blind love sick pianist, cat obsessed janitor, an urbane but creepy white gloved stalker and a gimpy blonde blackmail victim).  I’m generally not at all a fan of Susan Hayward once she became all actorly like – but she’s effective and lovely in this one as a world weary dance hall girl won over by the dire predicament (framed for murder!) of an earnest and naïve sailor on shore leave (Bill Williams).  The movie takes a while to justify the inclusion of a cab driver played by Paul Lukas who aids the Hayward and Williams characters in their amateur sleuthing; but it’s all tied to fairly surprising ending which requires more than a slight suspension of one’s disbelief.  For 83 minutes – this one is jammed packed; and thanks to DP Nick Musuraca looks pretty great.

• The Social Network (2010 – David Fincher) PRO(-) (Theater)
• Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983 – Naigsa Oshima) pro(-) (Blu-Ray)
• Boxcar Bertha (1972 – Martin Scorsese) con(+) (cable)
• Au bonheur des dames (1930 – Julien Duvivier) PRO(-) (DVD)

As others have noted the ending of this late silent film is some sort of bizarre narrative reversal, a kind of ideological 180 degree flip.  In King Vidor terms it’s like Duvivier, in filming Noel Renard’s adaptation of an Emile Zola novel about a mega department store (the titular Au bonheur des dames or Ladies’ Paradise), starting filming in the we the people populist spirit of Our Daily Bread but then finished up with The Fountainhead’s ode to the abmitious individual and progress . While the plot is rather slight for the operatic approach it’s an incredibly ambitious film visually – full of fluid, highly kinetic and often stunning sequences with one expressionistic montage after another. A real tour de-force that gave this movie buff a real rush despite its occasional failings as narrative.  The film stars the ever photogenic German born Dita Parlo who, while not prolific, is an icon of French Cinema based on her starring turn in L’Atalante and memorable support at the end of Grand Illusion.  Parlo plays an orphan new to the big city (Paris) where she is simultaneously seduced and oppressed by a hectic consumer culture wrapped in an art deco bow.  If Duvivier represents “Le Cinema de Papa” (as the new wavers to come would condescend), then Happy Father’s Day to us.

• Untamed Woman (1957 – Mikio Naruse) pro(+) (DVD-R)
• The Ghost Writer (2010 – Roman Polanski) pro(-) (DVD)
• Cornered (1945 – Edward Dmytryk) pro (DVD
• The Missouri Breaks (1976 – Arthur Penn) mixed (DVD)

Last Updated: September 30, 2010

• A River Called Titus (1973 – Ritwik Ghatak) pro(-) (DVD-R)
• Masques (1987 – Claude Chabrol) pro (DVD)
• The Maid (2009 – Sebastian Silva) pro (DVD)
• Le combat dans l’île (1962 – Alain Cavalier) pro(-) (DVD)
• Greaser’s Palace (1972 – Robert Downey Sr.) con(+) (cable)

A wild, crazy, occasionally disturbing and rarely funny low rent hodgepodge of a film.  While the foundation to the story is a parable on the life of Jesus Christ (played by a zoot suit clad Allan Arbus) that familiar tale is quickly rendered incoherent and grotesque by Downey’s various manic digressions or, more accurately, skits.   I once described French New Wave fringe filmmaker Luc Moullet’s 1971 film A Girl is A Gun (aka Une aventure de Billy le Kid) as a psychotronic riff on Westerns, a sort of improv dinner theater El Topo – I think I should have saved that description for this kooky “Western”.  Prefer Putney Swope by a wide margin.

• Brewster Mcleod (1970 – Robert Altman) mixed(+) (cable)
• Distant Thunder (1973 – Satyajit Ray) pro(+) (DVD-R)
• The Prowler (1951 – Joseph Losey) pro(+) (cable)

One of those films where the loosely applied film noir label offers little descriptive value as to what’s really going on. The film is more of “homme fatale” character study than a genre crime thriller, with the crime and related plot machinations being secondary to the trouble mind set of the villain (an anti-hero almost). While Evelyn Keyes plays the notional protagonist it’s the Van Heflin show all the way, with Heflin playing an unhinged beat cop named Webb Garwood who aggressively courts (read: stalks) a lonely housewife married to a radio show host who works nights.  Garwood’s misanthropic world view is almost Uncle Charlie (Shadow of a Doubt) like, spewing rants full of bile revealing his bitter disappointment in failing to meet various milestones towards achieving the elusive American Dream. Garwood’s motivations seem rather complex – equal parts cold criminal calculation and amour fou.  An edgy film and as the narrative progresses from the posh LA suburbs to an arid and rocky ghost town the story becomes increasingly implausible; but this distracts little because Heflin’s performance and his character’s predicament are so compelling. The finale is captivating, with Keyes’ suspicious character in labor about to deliver the couple’s love child while a paranoid Garwood acts as mid-wife, all to the sound of the voice of the man he murdered playing over the phonograph. Certainly seems a more personal and focused film than the other pre-blacklist Losey noir efforts like The Lawless and The Big Night (solid as they are).  This was one of Robert Aldrich’s last assignments as an assistant director, soon sliding over to the big chair and a fruitful helming career.

• A Prophet (2009 – Jacques Audiard) pro (DVD)
• The Cloud-Capped Star (1960 – Ritwik Ghatak) PRO (DVD-R)
• Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932 – Robert Florey) pro(-) (DVD)
• The Story of a Cheat (1936 – Sacha Guitry) PRO (DVD)
• The Secret in Their Eyes (2009 – Juan José Campanella) pro(+) (DVD)
• Youth in Revolt (2009 – Miguel Arteta) mixed(+) (Blu-Ray)
• Dark City (1950 – William Dieterle) pro(-) (DVD)
• L’enfance nue (1968 – Maurice Pialat) pro (DVD)
• Storm in a Teacup (1937 – Ian Dalrymple & Victor Saville) mixed(+) (cable)
• The Black Cat (1934 – Edgar G. Ulmer) pro (DVD)
• Barney’s Version (2010 – Richard J. Lewis) pro(-) (Theater)
• Saint Joan (1957 – Otto Preminger) mixed (DVD-R)
• Dust Be My Destiny (1939 – Lewis Seiler) mixed ( cable)
• Foolish Wives (1922 – Erich von Stroheim) pro (on-line)
• Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937 – Sadao Yamanaka) pro(+) (DVD-R)
• The Spiral Road (1962 – Robert Mulligan) mixed(+) (DVD)

A far from perfect but an often fascinating film set in the Dutch East Indies circa 1936, a sort of The Nun’s Story meets Heart of Darkness.  The overarching theme, set against the backdrop of a tropical and primitive leper colony, is science vs. faith.  The spiritual side represented by Salvation Army do-gooders and a veteran doctor played by Burl Ives (with typical “Big Daddy” bluster); and the science side by a newly minted atheist doctor played by a quite effective Rock Hudson (his character is not just a mere non-believer but a jaded Minister’s son who as a child defiantly dared God to strike him dead).  Hudson spends most of the movie suggesting his pre-transformation character from Magnificent Obsession – that of an arrogant, opportunistic, self-interested man; and the story of The Spiral Road, like that in Magnificent Obsession, is driven towards his ultimate psychological transformation.  The only suitable resolution being a worn down Hudson pleading for help to a God he has routinely denied.  Though wisely the story steers clear of backing a specific formal religion opting for the suggestion that “God” is merely derived from a vaguely Christian goodness in other people, all which was to me a little suggestive of, though presented in a far less mystical fashion, Frank Borzage’s Strange Cargo.  Robert Mulligan’s direction is staid and unfussy with long takes and centered compositions, which was to me surprisingly effective though I imagine most would slot in under uninspired.  Still for Mulligan, a former divinity student, this must have been a very personal project, even in the year of his greatest triumph (To Kill a Mockingbird).  The final portion of the film involving the attacks of an invisible enemy and shades of the psychological thriller genre in some ways prefigures Mulligan’s more stylishly directed Western The Stalking Moon.    The Spiral Road is overlong and tends to plod where it needs narrative momentum, and, as in so many films of the era, the native people are treated little more than one dimensional props.  Gena Rowlands supports in a fairly thankless role as Hudson’s wife and her performance, while by no means inept, offers a gentle reminder that small window dressing roles in studio films of this era (see also Lonely are the Brave from the same year) were not best showcase for her unique acting talent.  Flaws aside I found that this film displayed some sensitive and intelligent filmmaking and explored some interesting themes.

• Dark Journey (1937 – Victor Saville) pro(-) (cable)
• Downstairs (1932 – Monta Bell) pro (cable)
• The Pagan (1929 – W.S. Van Dyke) pro (cable)
• The Outlaw and his Wife (1918 – Victor Sjostrom) pro (DVD)
• Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922 – Fritz Lang) pro(+) (DVD)
• Love Happens (2009- Brandon Camp) con (cable)
• Verboten! (1959 – Samuel Fuller) pro (DVD-R)
• Nana (1926 – Jean Renoir) pro(-) (DVD)
• The Circus (1928 – Charles Chaplin) pro(+) (DVD)

August 2010

Last Updated: September 1, 2010

• Chloe (2009 – Atom Egoyan) con (DVD)
• A Woman of Paris (1923 – Charles Chaplin) pro(-) (DVD)
• The Merry Widow (1925 – Erich von Stroheim) pro(+) (cable)
• The Last Command (1928 – Josef von Sternberg) PRO(-) (DVD)

Perhaps it’s because I watched them back to back; but when the train in The Last Command shockingly plunges from the bridge to the icy river below presumably killing a slew of rowdy drunken Russian revolutionaries including the merciful Natalie (Evelyn Brent); I couldn’t help but think of the seemingly redeemed Felicitas’ (Greta Garbo) beautifully absurd icy death plunge in (the very good) Flesh and the Devil as she rushes to Friendship Isle to stop a needless duel between lifelong friends made romantic rivals. The once devilish Garbo’s martyrdom willed upon her by another character’s prayers, the more sympathetic Brent’s by some sort of cosmic anti-communist joke.  Based on the lead character’s fate in each of The Last Command, The Last Laugh and The Blue Angel, Emil Jannings must have been some sort of masochist (in silent cinema terms he’s the acting equivalent of Chaney’s character in He Who Gets Slapped).  At least in Faust Jannings gets to spend most of the film with the upper hand.  Jannings, who more often than not played to the back row of the audience, is magnificent in The Last Command and in the end he’s rewarded with his pathos drenched pre-Sunset Blvd. Norma Desmond moment – a last delusion hurrah for a noble but broken man. I was patting myself on the back for linking this film to another from 1928 – Robert Florey’s avant garde short The Life And Death Of 9413, A Hollywood Extra – but lo and behold the booklet the comes with Criterion von Sternberg DVD set makes the same observation.

• Flesh and the Devil (1926 – Clarence Brown) pro(+) (cable)
• The Big Parade (1925 – King Vidor) PRO (cable)
• The Docks of New York (1928 – Joseph von Sternberg) PRO (DVD)
• The Show (1927 – Tod Browning) pro(-) (cable)

Budapest circus side show set intrigue that has more than a few elements prefiguring both Browning’s legendary Freaks (1932) and The Unknown (also 1927).  John Gilbert is a charismatic and caddish carnival barker (a Liliom type, form fitting striped shirt and all) and here he woos a glorified hoochie coochie dancer that goes by the stage name Salome (as part of an act involving the beheading of John the Baptist).  Gilbert is reunited, with less romantic effect, to his The Big Parade love interest Renée Adorée.  Lionel Barrymore, who would later star in the late period Browning film The Devil Doll is a suitably diabolical villain known as the Greek.  He gets up close and personal with a deadly gila monster.

• Underworld (1927 – Josef von Sternberg) pro(+) (DVD)
• 10 Rillington Place (1971 – Richard Fleischer) pro (cable)

Perhaps its serial killer film fatigue that stops me from completely gushing about this film; but I’ll admit that this deliberately paced authentic but grim film really is perfectly executed by Fleischer with a far more subtle, if not “invisible”, style than he earlier brought to his true crime killer films Compulsion (Leopold and Loeb) and The Boston Strangler (Albert DeSalvo).  A disturbing, without being exploitive (Mandingo this is not), film featuring standout performances by Richard Attenborough (in sort of downtrodden Séance on a Wet Afternoon mode) as rather banal cold blooded killer John Christie and John Hurt as the dim witted miscarriage of justice victim Timothy John Evans.  While it’s ultimately a message movie (anti-capital punishment) it never strains to hammer the message home.

• Desert Nights (1929 – William Nigh) pro (cable)
• He Who Gets Slapped (1924 – Victor Sjostrom) pro (cable)
• The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927 – Ernst Lubitsch) PRO(-) (cable)
• Daughters Courageous (1939 – Michael Curtiz) pro (cable)

I’ve seen this referred to as a loose remake of the 1938 Curtiz film and a personal favorite of mine Four Daughters; but that’s not really at all accurate.  Despite largely the same cast (Fay Bainter & Donald Crisp the most significant additions) there are key differences in plot and characters; particularly in the Claude Rains character, here playing an estranged patriarch susceptible to wanderlust instead of the devoted and reliable widower and musician of Four Daughters. The Epstein brothers’ episodic script crackles under the capable hands of the cast (particularly the always terrific Priscilla Lane and John Garfield), but still the superior Four Daughters hovers over the proceedings revealing the limits of the charms of Daughters Courageous.  Garfield again effectively plays a rebellious bad ass – but by the final act he’s a tad neutered, yielding to the Rains martyrdom story line.  Overall Daughters Courageous is a fairly entertaining film and a step up from the real Four Daughters sequel of 1939, also directed by Curtiz, Four Wives.  The directing assignment of the final and weakest film in the series (1941’s Four Mothers) would fall to lower profile Warner Bros. workhorse William Keighley, the man Curtiz once replaced on The Adventures of Robin Hood.

• The Tarnished Angels (1958 – Douglas Sirk) pro(+) (cable)
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923 – Wallace Worsley) pro(-) (cable)
• Polly of the Circus (1932 – Alfred Santell) mixed(+) (cable)
• Northern Pursuit (1943 – Raoul Walsh) pro(-) (DVD)
• Throw of the Dice (1929 – Franz Osten) pro (cable)
• Bank Holiday (1938 – Carol Reed) pro(-) (cable)
• Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928 – Charles Reisner)  pro (Blu-Ray)
• Inception (2010 – Christopher Nolan) pro (Theater)
• Ben-Hur (1925 – Fred Nibilo) pro (DVD)
• Alambrista! (1977 – Robert M. Young) pro (DVD-R)
• Canyon Passage (1946 – Jacques Tourneur) pro (cable)
• Cry of the Hunted (1953 – Joseph H. Lewis) pro(-) (cable)
• So Dark the Night (1946 – Joseph H. Lewis) pro(+) (cable)

July 2010

Last Updated: July 31, 2010

• Crime in the Streets (1956 – Don Siegel) pro(-) (DVD)
• Armored Car Robbery (1950 – Richard Fleischer) pro (DVD)
• Whirlpool of Fate (1925 – Jean Renoir) pro(-) (DVD)
• The Love Parade (1929 – Ernst Lubitsch) pro(+) (DVD)

• Flight (1929 – Frank Capra) pro(-) (cable)
• Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010 – Chris Columbus) con(+) (Blu-Ray)
• Faust (1926 – F. W. Murnau) PRO (DVD)
• Sex in Chains (1928 – William Dieterle) mixed (DVD)
• Greenberg (2010 – Noah Baumbach) pro (Blu-Ray)
• Blackmail (1929 – Alfred Hitchcock) pro (cable)
• The Younger Generation (1929 – Frank Capra) pro(-) (cable)
• The Wedding March (1928 – Erich Von Stroheim) PRO(-) (on-line)
• Diary of a Lost Girl (1929 – G.W. Pabst) pro(+) (DVD)

In Pandora’s Box Louise Brooks is the predator (though rather inadvertent, almost benign in intent if not consequence); but here, in the same year for the same director, she is the prey.  A little something is lost in the difference; Brooks, while remaining wholly magnetic, seems a shade less enigmatic.  Still, this is a truly winning late silent episodic melodrama with hints of comedy; and the array of fallen woman / mother martyr / reformatory injustice/ redemption tropes are so perfectly executed that they remain forever fresh.  Pabst’s dynamic staging doesn’t hurt any either.

• Poil de Carotte (1925 – Julien Duvivier) pro (+) (DVD)
• Speedy (1928 – Ted Wilde) pro (cable)
• The Patsy (1928 – King Vidor) PRO(-) (cable)
• The Kid (1921 – Charles Chaplin) pro(+) (On-Line)
• The Man Who Laughs (1928 – Paul Leni) pro(+) (DVD)
• White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929 – Arnold Fanck, G.W. Pabst) pro (DVD)
• The White Ribbon (2009 – Michael Haneke) pro(+) (Blu-Ray)
• The Navigator (1924 – Buster Keaton) pro(+) (DVD)
• Waxworks (1924 – Paul Leni) pro (DVD)
• Slightly French (1949 – Douglas Sirk) mixed(+) (cable)

This frothy semi-musical Pygmalion lite romantic comedy was quite a departure for director Douglas Sirk when one considers his noir tinged late 40s output.  It seems the film’s reputation is rather weak due to the routine and familiar plotting and lower tier stars of limited overall ability (Don Ameche and Dorothy Lamour – though not without their charms). Yet Sirk’s famed knack for space, composition and integration of architecture still emerges to elevate it all above its bottom half of a double bill station.  There’s a mild temptation to prop this up from obscurity as some sort of an unsung classic; but that might be pushing the auteurist envelope a little bit.  Overall a breezy trifle of a film that has some occasional wit and number of rewarding visual moments particularly for the hardcore Sirk completists. A remake of Columbia’s 1933 Ann Sothern vehicle Let’s Fall in Love and it appears that main plot switch was that Ann Sothern played a carnival performer masquerading as a Swedish movie diva whereas Lamour plays a carnival performer turned faux French movie diva.

• The Last Laugh (1924 – F.W. Murnau) PRO(-) (DVD)

This bold technical marvel is justly legendary for probably a dozen or so reasons; but I must admit I can’t see the original intended miserabalist (it’s beyond downbeat) ending in the hotel lavatory actually being effective, let alone satisfying.  While the “tacked-on” or “cop out” epilogue section presents a seismic tonal shift that’s more absurd than cathartic; it still, to me, works overall with only the pre-epilogue inter-title disclaimer irking me.  A better compromise would have been to turn the final portion into some sort of illusory death dream for Emil Jannings disenchanted former doorman, like that in Renoir’s 1928 take on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl.  Between despair and elation there is always the opportunity for the bittersweet.  A happy ending need not appear a contrivance or mere concession to popular taste.

• Bed and Sofa (1927 – Abram Room) pro (DVD)
• Alice in Wonderland (2010 – Tim Burton) pro(-) (Blu-Ray)
• Hotel du Nord (1938 – Marcel Carne) pro(+) (DVD)
• Night Train to Munich (1940 – Carol Reed) pro (DVD)
• Erotikon (1920 – Mauritz Stiller) pro (DVD)

This famed Swedish silent lauded for its performances and modernity is a sophisticated adult comedy of manners that has been said to inspire the likes of Lubitsch and Chaplin with plot traces and attitudes that would later be found in Renoir’s La Règale du jeu and Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night.  (Though based on evidence in Lubitsch’s The Merry Jail (1917) it seems to me that Lubitsch was well on his way by this time to establishing his own personality and thematic concerns.  Perhaps Stiller and company inspired some refinement).  The lead female role of the married libertine Irene who teases both an aviator and a sculptor is memorable played with great wit and depth by Tora Teje.  Critic David Thomson went so far as stating that Teje may have given the best performance by a woman in all of the movies up until the time of Erotikon’s release.  Director Stiller, in addition to being a mentor to Greta Garbo and directing her in the famed Gosta Berlings Saga, was along with Victor Sjöström one of the giants of early Swedish cinema.  Unfortunately the musical score included on the remastered DVD is horrible match for the film, it’s far too ponderous, almost dirge like, more fitting for an elegy than a drawing room comedy.  Surely there is a middle ground between melancholic and frivolous.

• The Little Match Girl (1928 – Jean Renoir) pro(+) (DVD)
• Company Limited (1971 – Satyajit Ray) pro (DVD-R)
• Asphalt (1929 – Joe May) pro(-) (DVD)

 Last Updated July 5, 2010 

• Piccadilly (1929 – E.A. Dupont) pro (DVD)
• The Man With a Movie Camera (1929 – Dziga Vertov) pro (DVD)
• Our Hospitality (1923 – John Blystone, Buster Keaton) PRO (DVD)
• Days and Nights in the Forest (1970 – Satyajit Ray) PRO (DVD-R)
• Visages d’enfants (1925 – Jaques Feyder) pro (cable)
• A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929 – Anthony Asquith) PRO (DVD)
• The Italian Straw Hat (1928 – Rene Clair) PRO(-) (DVD)
• The Offence (1973 – Sidney Lumet) pro(-) (DVD-R)
• The Love Trap (1929 – William Wyler) pro(-) (DVD)
• The Lodger (1927 – Alfred Hitchcock) pro (DVD)
• In the Electric Mist (2009 – Bertrand Tavernier) mixed(+) (cable)
• Violence at Noon (1966 – Nagisa Oshima) PRO (DVD)
• Drag Me to Hell (2009 – Sam Raimi) mixed (cable)
• Pandora’s Box (1929 – G.W. Pabst) PRO (DVD)
• The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968 – Robert Aldrich) con (cable)

Aldrich is no stranger to letting seasoned Hollywood actresses let it all hang out in the slew of “women’s pictures” he made over his career, with such high octane emoting coming from the likes of Bette Davis (Baby Jane), Joan Crawford (Autumn Leaves), Olivia De Havilland (Sweet Charlotte) Ida Lupino (The Big Knife) and Beryl Reid (Sister George).  Here in this personal project (bankrolled by the money and good will generated by the success of The Dirty Dozen) Aldrich requires his star Kim Novak, in a challenging pseudo dual-role (with more than a hint of Vertigo), to give a fearless performance. The problem is that Novak doesn’t do fearless – her best performances thrive on an insecurity and unease (see Picnic, Middle of the Night, Vertigo and, particularly, Strangers When We Meet).  Novak – perfectly cast for the timid wannabe actress Elsa character – can’t pull off Lylah Clare the deceased sex bomb starlet who seemingly possesses Elsa from beyond the grave.  Watching a brasserie clad Novak stroll across the lawn of a Hollywood estate reciting inane dialogue all while employing a husky Bavarian accent suited for a drag queen is the height of absurdity. The result is a Razzie worthy career killer.  Though it’s worth noting that with the script, structure, pace and horrible flashback effects not even the best portrayal of Elsa/Lylah could save this turkey. A typecast Peter Finch and Ernest Borgnine (who previously starred in Aldrich’s Flight of the Phoenix) offer little able support to the overmatched Novak.  In the end it is watchable and occasionally even fun – fodder for the camp cultists.  I’m a fan of a number of Aldrich films and have typically equated him with being a Sam Fuller type of director, but it seems that the more I see, the more I’m noticing Fulleresque flaws without the balance of the sizeable Fulleresque merits.

• Northwest Passage (1940 – King Vidor) pro (cable)
• The Deadly Affair (1966 – Sidney Lumet) mixed (cable)
• Manufactured Landscapes (2006 – Jennifer Baichwal) pro (airplane)
• Invictus (2009 – Clint Eastwood) pro (airplane)
• Date Night (2010 – Shawn Levy) mixed(+) (cable)
• Pleasures of the Flesh (1965 – Nagisa Oshima) pro (DVD)
• The Whisperers (1967 – Bryan Forbes) pro (cable)
• Frisco Jenny (1932 – William Wellman) pro (DVD)
• Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962 – Ralph Nelson) pro (cable)
• Mr. Lucky (1943 – H.C. Potter) pro(+) (cable)
• Roughly Speaking (1945 – Michael Curtiz) pro (cable)
• There’s Always Tomorrow (1956 – Douglas Sirk) PRO (DVD)

I rank this slightly ahead of Sirk’s more emotionally amplified and colorful (literally/figuratively) film Written on the Wind. If it’s a “woman’s picture” it’s a man’s woman’s picture. The subject matter is on the surface so banal or routine that it’s a real marvel how “true” (if not profound) it all seems; especially when pragmatism and romanticism collide in a sort of personal suburban tragedy, all in 84 minutes and in black and white. It’s like Sirk took the kids taking a parent for granted angle that plays a memorable but small part in All that Heaven Allows and magnified it. Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck are so exceptional (particularly MacMurray) you completely forget their earlier more iconic paring (Double Indemnity). Though I think it’s a slightly lesser film, Stanwyck plays a similar sort of role in Sirk’s All I Desire - though she’s ultimately more prominent. Those who take Sirk’s 50s work at Universal as campy (I’m not one though I can see the inclination) will have trouble finding much camp in either All I Desire or There’s Always Tomorrow. The unhappy/happy ending was to me reminiscent of the one in The Reckless Moment (plus there’s a Joan Bennett connection) – another great film with a surface simplicity of plot hiding complex character emotions.

• Yesterday Girl (1966 – Alexander Kluge) pro(+) (DVD)

Both a stylistically and tonally adventurous film that reminded me more of the Jean-Luc Godard, Dusan Makavejev and the Czech New Wave films of the period than it did to the other German New Wave films that would follow.  I could see little kinship in style (though maybe not attitude) in the early works of Fassbinder, Herzog, Schlöndorf and Wenders or the contemporary work of East German filmmaker Frank Beyer.  In Yesterday Girl, the director’s sister Alexandra convincingly plays the titular lost soul, an adrift and guileless refugee in her own post war politically divided land.  An ambiguous politically blank but strangely reliant person mislead or let down by every person, idea and institution she comes across.  An episodic film that is as much a lament as it is a satire, and the bits of picaresque and black humor do little to dull the political bite and scathing social commentary.  Ed Howard, Acquarello and Sean Axmaker’s reviews of the DVD release available on line get to the heart of it.  Dense, ambitious and surprisingly accessible, seems like essential stuff to me.

• All I Desire (1953 – Douglas Sirk) pro (DVD)
• Kameradschaft (1931 – G.W. Pabst) pro (VHS)
• Crazy Heart (2009 – Scott Cooper) mixed (DVD)
• Land Without Bread (1933 – Luis Bunuel) pro(+) (on-line)
• A Day in the Country (1936 – Jean Renoir) PRO (on-Line)
• Gold Diggers of 1937  (1936 – Lloyd Bacon) mixed(+) (cable)
• The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959 – Ranald MacDougall) mixed(+) (DVD-R)

An interesting well made (if unevenly acted) film produced by star Harry Belefonte, the same year his production company made the solid heist film Odds Against Tomorrow.  A once daring but compromised film that time has reduced to little more than a mere curiosity.  Notionally a science fiction film that leverages cold war paranoia relating to the extermination of the human race; but it’s ultimately a racial intolerance morality play.  A three hander (Belefonte, Inger Stevens and Mel Ferrer are the only actors who appear) acted out on the barren streets of New York, a city made desolate as the result of an apparent worldwide atomic catastrophe obliterating virtually all human life.  Danger to the three survivors comes not from drifting nuclear clouds (On the Beach, also from 1959), vampiric mutants (The Last Man on Earth / The Omega Man / I Am Legend) or desperate cannibals (The Road); but from a base sexual rivalry. Life and death struggles reduced to love triangle melodrama, thankfully there are no pesky rotting corpses to interrupt Belefonte’s once forbidden (he’s black, she’s white) courtship of Stevens’ character, only Mel Ferrer making like an entitled sexual predator.  It’s all more Knife in the Water tension than The Day After despair, with any sci-fi possibilities of the story completely diffused. Somewhat absurd, often unconvincing and too blatant to be seen as truly allegorical (particularly in hindsight); but in the context of its time it has a certain undeniable impact.  After all, this was pre-civil rights movement 1959 an environment where the film was boycotted in parts of the American South and in typical act of producer self-censorship Belefonte and Stevens, despite some talk, do little more than hold hands in desexualized friendship (shades of Belefonte and Joan Fontaine in the equally compromised Island in the Sun) (It’s also noteworthy that in real life Inger Stevens felt compelled to hide her 1961 marriage to a black man (Ike Davis) so as to protect her career).  Unfortunately, in the film there’s no context for the characters’ personal racial issues; only the then prevailing societal norms it seems; and in the end it resembles a Rod Serling teleplay more than a nuanced living breathing human story.  The director is probably best known for his screenwriting work for Warner Brothers in the 40s (e.g. Mildred Pierce). 

May 2010

• Maid of Salem (1937 – Frank Lloyd) pro(-) (DVD)
• The Home and the World (1984 – Satyajit Ray ) pro (DVD-R)
• The Front Page (1931 – Lewis Milestone) pro (cable)
• The Girl on the Train (2009 – André Téchiné) pro (DVD)
• No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948 – St. John Legh Clowes) con(+) (DVD)

Can’t remember the last time I rented a film with an IMDB user rating as low as this one (currently 4.6); but how can a curious one resist this once scandalous “Brit Noir” that New York’s Film Forum, dubbed “the most bizarre British film ever“.  Also of interest because James Hadley Chase’s 1939 condemned smash hit source novel (the lurid details of which are itemized by George Orwell in a memorable 1944 essay) was also adapted into Robert Aldrich’s sleazy The Grissom Gang.  All in all it’s not as bad as advertised.  While the plotting is absurd, the performances range from flat to strange, and the direction and editing, despite the occasional hint of inspiration/ambition, is largely sloppy and indifferent; the movie always remains watchable.  The film is set in the American gangster underworld, but the cast is entirely British and I’d say some of the New Yawk accents need some work there guvnor.

• I Was Born, But … (1932 – Yasujiro Ozu) PRO (DVD)
• Tetro (2009 – Francis Ford Copppola) mixed(+) (Blu-Ray)
• Steamboat Round the Bend (1935 – John Ford) pro (DVD)
• Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935 – Busby Berkeley) pro (cable)
• One Deadly Summer (1983 – Jean Becker) pro (DVD)

A mystery thriller set in a lovely sun baked provincial town in Southern France; but there’s little Pagnolian warmth in the tone, more like the bitterness and edge of a Clouzot or a Chabrol.  I knew little about this once lauded movie directed by Jacques Becker’s son Jean and for the first 30 odd minutes I’ll admit to being puzzled as to why a 28 year old Isabelle Adjani, who by 1983 had garnered an Oscar nomination (The Story of Adele H.) and both Cannes and César wins (Possession and Quartet), would star as a sort of typical femme fatale in a nice looking but seemingly run of the mill psycho-sexual genre thriller.  But then, out of the blue, the narrative perspective changes from the notional protagonist (singer Alain Souchon) to Adjani’s character, a nineteen year old known as Elle, a child-woman that is equal parts wide eyed naïf, sexualized manipulator and crazed avenging black widow. The perspective (and accompanying voice over narration) continues to shift to different characters in the story (though not with a regimented structure of a Rashomon); but make no mistake its Adjani’s show the entire way, and no one can play kooky sexy like Adjani.  Flashbacks are layered in to add to the intrigue, complexity and occasional bizarre plot turn; but Becker and company have difficulty maintaining the momentum built up until resolution of the central mystery; though the downbeat denouement is certainly interesting.

• Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933 – Hiroshi Shimizu) pro(+) (DVD)
• Mammoth (2009 – Lukas Moodysson) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933 – Mervyn Leroy) PRO(-) (cable)
• Fanny (1932 – Marc Allégret) pro (cable)
• Lovely & Amazing (2001 – Nicole Holofcener) mixed(+) (DVD)
• Grown Up Movie Star (2009 – Adriana Maggs) mixed (DVD)
• Run of the Arrow (1957 – Sam Fuller) pro(+) (cable)
• Mata Hari (1931 – George Fitzmaurice) pro(-) (DVD)
• Profumo di donna (1974 – Dino Risi) pro (DVD)