[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel, TCM, a theater, YouTube.]
★★★★
Prix de Beauté, aka Miss Europe (dir. Augusto Genina, 1930). Our Miss Brooks (Louise), in a movie that may have helped inspire Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novella The Invention of Morel (no spoilers). Brooks plays Lucienne Garnier, a typist who wins a European beauty contest, thereby making life with her possessive partner André increasingly difficult for her (the title suggests both a prize and a price to be paid). One of the great pleasures of this movie, aside from the chance to see Louise Brooks, is the attention the camera pays to so many details of everyday life — someone removing shoes at the beach, women typing, a waiter carrying plates, a man hawking newspapers — much in the spirit of People on Sunday (dir. Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930). And there’s an bizarre ultra-meta ending. ★★★★ (YT)
*
The Night Holds Terror (dir. Andrew L. Stone, 1955). It‘s two movies in one. First, a thriller (of sorts), based on a true story, in which three killers on the run hold an aerospace engineer and his family captive in their house, before taking the engineer hostage and demanding an enormous ransom from his grocery-chain father. And then, in the final half hour, what might be called a telephone-company procedural, in which the full forces of Ma Bell are tasked with tracing the killers’ phone call. With Vince Edwards, John Cassavetes, Jack Kruschen (the doctor neighbor in The Apartment ), and some striking mid-century interiors. ★★★ (YT)
*
The Window (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). When a boy given to telling tall tales witnesses a murder, no one believes him, save for the killers. Bobby Driscoll is the boy in danger; Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale, his parents; Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman, the killers one flight up. It’s a perfect small-scale noir, played out in a Manhattan tenement and an abandoned building (alas, Driscoll, just thirty-one, would be found dead in such a building).That this movie has made it into a twelve-movies post for the fourth time would suggest that I’m willing to watch it whenever I’m aware of it. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Disputed Passage (dir. Frank Borzage, 1939). A strange, compelling movie that pits the head against the heart. Dr. Foster (Akim Tamiroff), or “Tubby,” as his more derisive students call him, is a surgeon and med school professor, a man of reason, insisting on emotional detachment and undivided devotion to work. John Howard (John Wesley Beaven) is a med student who makes room for emotion in his life. That includes his relationship with a Chinese med student, Audrey Hilton (Dorothy Lamour), a relationship that “Tubby” insists must end. Yes, Lamour is playing an Asian woman, but the movie is blessedly free of orientalism, with its Chinese characters and locales presented with nothing but respect. ★★★★ (YT)
[The title comes from Walt Whitman, “Stronger Lessons”:
Have you learn’d lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you?*
Have you not learn’d great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?]
Mystery Broadcast (dir. George Sherman, 1943). A meta start, as a crime in progress turns out to be a moment in a radio drama, and more moments of sly comedy follow. The premise: a writer of radio mysteries (Ruth Terry) teams up with her sound woman (Mary Treen) and the star of a rival detective show (Frank Albertson) to work on a unsolved real-world crime. The plot is baffling, in a low-budget way. Fun to see Albertson and Treen, probably best known from It’s a Wonderful Life, where they appeared as Sam Wainwright and Tilly, the secretary at the Building and Loan. ★★ (YT)
*
One Crowded Night (dir. Irving Reis, 1940). A movie that honors the Aristotelian unities of time and place and action: everything happens from one morning to the next at a desert oasis (gas, food, and cabins), with various life stories knit into a whole as travelers stop for gas, food, and shelter. But improbable possibilities (which Aristotle frowned on) abound. I recognized just two cast members: Ann Revere (a stoic matriarch) and Gale Storm (a young waitress looking to get out). The most interesting character here: Brother Joseph (J.M. Kerrigan), a Micawber-like patent-medicine hawker who rises to a crucial occasion. ★★★ (YT)
*
Grace of My Heart (dir. Allison Anders, 1996). Loosely based on the life of Carole King, and starring Illeana Douglas (whom I knew only as the art teacher in Ghost World and Kenny’s nameless wife in Frasier ) as Edna Buxton, a singer-songwriter in a world that knows no such category. As Denise Waverly, Edna forsakes singing for writing, cranking out hits from the Brill Building, where she works for Joel Milner (John Turturro), a Phil Spector-like (in appearance, not personality) producer, before coming into her own. Along the way, the story takes a baffling (wrong) turn when Denise moves to Los Angeles and begins a doomed relationship with a Brian Wilson-like savant (Matt Dillon) at work on an album reminsicent of SMiLE. Great music throughout, with songs by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, Gerry Goffin, Joni Mitchell, Carole Bayer Sager, and others. ★★★ (CC)
*
Dark Mountain (dir. William Berke, 1944). YAMBAFNWI: a forest ranger (Robert Lowery) in charge of Dark Mountain reconnects with the woman (Ellen Drew) he thought he was waiting for him, but she’s already married — to a businessman who turns out to be a black marketeer (Regis Toomey), and who’s put her name on the warehouse leases. The movie turns into something of a low-budget High Sierra, complete with a mountain cabin and a little dog (and Toomey, in white shirt and black vest, looking like Humphrey Bogart’s Duke Mantee). It’s cliché after cliché for fifty-six dull minutes. But it’s fun to see Toomey (the mild-mannered soda jerk in Meet John Doe) as a murderous bad guy. ★★ (YT)
[YAMBAFNWI: Yet Another Movie Billed As Film Noir Which Isn’t.]
*
Murder on the Waterfront (dir. B. Reeves Eason, 1943). The IMDb says that it’s the shortest Warner Bros. release, but it’s not short enough. It begins with song and dance, as entertainers put on a show at a Navy camp and add perhaps ten minutes to the proceedings. When the inventor of a new piece of military hardware arrives at the camp and is promptly murdered, suspicion falls in several directions. Nothing about the events that follow is even remotely plausible. ★ (TCM)
*
White Echo (dir. Chloë Sevigny, 2019). A short film about to leave the Criterion Channel, so we watched it. Five young women make a short escape from the city to an old country house, where, one claims, something terrible once happened. The women try a Ouija board, dance and drink, and talk about patriarchy. Some mildly spooky moments, and one grisly spooky moment, but the pieces don’t add up, at least not to a sum I can figure out. ★★ (CC)
*
Appointment with Danger (dir. Lewis Allen, 1950). Al Goddard (Alan Ladd) is one hardass postal inspector. Assigned to investigate the murder of a fellow inspector — a man he promptly announces he didn’t like — he gives the work his all, posing as a corrupt inspector and getting in on a plan to stop a train and seize a large money shipment. With Paul Stewart as the leader of a criminal gang, Phyllis Calvert as a nun who can identify one of the gang, Jan Sterling as a bop-loving moll, and Harry Morgan and Jack Webb as gang members (Webb’s character is particularly vicious). Close calls and tight spots abound, and the movie is well worth the $3.99 Amazon charges to rent it, seventy-six years after the fact. ★★★★ (A)
*
You Can See Everything (dir. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, 2026). At home with fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, her husband Billy Evans, and their children. I thought of the title of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method as a way to think about this unforgettable documentary: Nathan Fielder sets out to figure out the truth about Holmes’s character and her failed biotech project Theranos, and he uses his usual method of asking awkwardly probing questions to get there. And the project runs up against what seems to be the radical unknowability of an other, whoever that other might be. And just when the story seems to be wrapping up, it begins again, Vertigo-like. ★★★★ (T)
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
