Twelve movies

[Now with stars, one to four. And four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Chavela (dir. Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi, 2017). A documentary portrait of Chavela Vargas (1919–2012), a Costa Rican-born Mexican singer who performed with an extraordinary musical and emotional intensity and turned ranchera songs into expressions of same-sex and universal desire. (As she says at one point, it doesn’t matter who it is one loves.) Comparisons to Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf abound, but the authority with which Chavela sings and speaks of life and love and suffering makes me think of what it must have been like to listen to Sappho. I’m not kidding. ★★★★

*

I Served the King of England (dir. Jiří Menzel, 2006). I had to do a “Wait, what?”: this film is by the director of Closely Watched Trains and Loves of a Blonde. The changing fortunes of Jan Dítě, a Czech everyman, as seen in a splendid past (in which he’s played by Ivan Barnev) and a dingy present (Oldrich Kaiser). Says Dítě, “It was always my luck to run into bad luck.” This hotel-centric film must have influenced Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, but Menzel’s imagination runs much deeper. ★★★★

*

Three Identical Strangers (dir. Tim Wardle, 2018). A documentary about triplets separated in infancy and reunited as young men. What begins as a feel-good human-interest story turns out to be a story of appallingly immorality — or is it amorality? — and its consequences. Don’t read a review in advance. And if you have read a review, see it anyway: there’ll still be more to learn. ★★★★

*

La roue (The Wheel) (dir. Abel Gance, 1923). A four-and-a-half-hour silent, made with a remarkably ample toolkit of storytelling devices, La roue might be the closest thing to a novel I’ve seen in film. The story focuses on Sisif, a train engineer who adopts a foundling, Norma, as a sibling to his son, Elie. Both father and son fall in love with their not-daughter, not-sister. With a great score by Robert Israel. ★★★★


[Norma (Ivy Close), Elie (Gabriel de Gravone), Sisif (Séverin-Mars). Click for a larger view.]

*

A little Fred Zinnemann festival
Eyes in the Night (1942). If you know Edward Arnold only as Jim Taylor, the political boss of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, this film affords a better sense of his range. Here he plays Duncan “Mac” Maclain, a blind detective who performs card tricks and works jigsaw puzzles. With the help of his trusty dog Friday, Mac breaks up a spy ring and saves a war secret. Donna Reed gives a surprising performance as a wayward teenager crazy about — yikes — her stepmother’s no-good ex-boyfriend. ★★★☆

Kid Glove Killer (1942). Van Heflin and Marsha Hunt as police forensic investigators, solving crimes in a city rife with corruption. Also included: a love triangle, a radio show and its host, a wrongly accused diner owner, fun with microscopes and spectroscopes, and many moments of bumming and lighting cigarettes. In other words, this movie is a little too scattered. But Heflin and Hunt are a delight as they turn cigarette ignition into foreplay.
★★★☆

Act of Violence (1949). Back from the war, bombardier Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan), never without coat and tie, pursues his friend and fellow vet Frank Enley (Van Heflin). You’ll have to watch to know why. Phyllis Thaxter, Janet Leigh, and Mary Astor do what they can to help bring about a peaceful resolution. With some great Los Angeles location shots. ★★★★

*

I’m So Excited! (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2013). The least satisfying Almodóvar film I’ve seen. Set almost entirely in an airplane unable to land, the film offers not a comic spectacle of fear and frenzy but an assemblage of odd, discontinuous, not especially funny bits. It doesn’t help that everyone in economy class has been sedated. More like a very long Saturday Night Live skit than an Almodóvar film. ★★☆☆

*

These Three (dir. William Wyler, 1936). A straightened (that is, heterosexualized) adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour. Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon play Misses Martha Dobie and Karen Wright as cool-headed, independent, resilient women, markedly different from the more agonized Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn of Wyler’s remake The Children’s Hour (1961). But the real star here is Bonita Granville (who’d later play Nancy Drew) as the manipulative, destructive Mary Tilford. A budding psychopath, that Mary Tilford. ★★★★

*

Made in Dagenham (dir. Nigel Cole, 2010). Based on the true story of women, or “girls,” as they’re called here, striking for equal pay at a British Ford factory. This film seems to telegraph every setback and victory with stupefying obviousness — see, for instance, George’s fate. But the acting is strong: Bob Hoskins, Geraldine James, Daniel Mays, Miranda Richardson, and the great Sally Hawkins as Rita O’Grady, who’s pressed into service as the leader of the women’s effort. I found it deeply moving to see Hawkins playing a character who speaks truth to patriarchy: “Rights, it’s not privileges: it’s that easy.” ★★★☆

*

A Lion in the Streets (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1953). Hank Martin, rural peddler — a successful businessman, we might say — turns demagogue. At the time, the movie would have suggested Huey Long; today, similarities to another political figure are unmistakable. The dialogue is sometimes cringe-worthy, and James Cagney’s performance as Martin feels too hammy, too stagey, but then again, that’s the kind of character he’s meant to be playing. Barbara Hale and Anne Francis are excellent as Martin’s wife Verity and lover Flamingo. ★★★☆

*

Middle of the Night (dir. Delbert Mann, 1959). Love against the odds in Manhattan’s garment district, with Fredric March as a clothing manufacturer, fifty-six and widowed, and Kim Novak as a receptionist and secretary, twenty-four and recently divorced. As in Marty (Paddy Chayefsky wrote both screenplays), everyone has something to say about the relationship, and there’s even some amateur psychologizing about neurosis and father figures. One can only hope that love, in all its awkwardness and fumbling, will win out. Great black-and-white shots of mid-century Manhattan streets are a bonus. ★★★☆

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)