Twelve movies

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

Patience (After Sebald) (dir. Grant Gee, 2012). An homage to W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, moving through empty landscapes that look like grayish, grainy Sebaldian photographs come to life. Passages from The Rings of Saturn, interview excerpts, and conversations with friends and admirers help to add a human dimension. One mark of the filmmaker’s devotion to his subject: a page number accompanies each place name on screen. But what makes The Rings of Saturn so extraordinary — its writer’s ability to move from the particulars of place into history, imagination, literature, memory — eludes the film. ★★★☆

*

49th Parallel (dir. Michael Powell, 1941). Filmstruck has many films I’ve never even heard of, and the ones whose titles begin with numbers are listed first: thus I learned of 49th Parallel. Members of a U-boat crew come ashore in Canada to find supplies and find themselves stranded when their craft is sunk. Brutality and comic touches in the right proportions, as the fugitives abandon their goal of Vancouver (and a Japanese ship) and head for the still-neutral United States. Fine turns by Laurence Olivier (a fur trapper) and Leslie Howard (a Matisse- and Picasso-collecting writer in a tepee). ★★★★

*

Above Suspicion (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1943). A nice young couple (Fred MacMurray and Joan Crawford) travel from England to Germany, They’re honeymooners, yes, but they’re really on an intelligence mission. In the spirit of The 39 Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Night Train to Munich, with comic touches and mild suspense. Also with secret musical codes. ★★★★

*

Journey into Fear (dir. Norman Foster, 1943). After almost being murdered in an Istanbul nightclub, an American armaments engineer (Joseph Cotten) is given what’s supposed to be safe passage on a ship to a Soviet port city. The passage is anything but safe. Plot, meh. The real reward here is the procession of Mercury Theatre people: Cotten, of course, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick, Orson Welles. ★★★☆

*

Land of Mine (dir. Martin Zandvliet, 2015). In post-WWII Denmark, German prisoners of war — boys, really — are pressed into the deadly work of locating, defusing, and removing landmines from a beach, day after day, under the eye of a brutal Danish sergeant. By night the boys are locked into a barracks of sorts. Do concentration camps come to mind yet? As death follows death, this harrowing film charts the changing relationship between the sergeant and his charges. ★★★★

*

The Big Sleep (dir. Howard Hawks, 1946). Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, enmeshed in a bewildering social network of dirty pictures, blackmail, and murder. I took notes while watching and still don’t understand how Philip Marlowe figures everything out. Best enjoyed as amusing vignettes and snappy patter. Dig the bookstore! ★★★☆

*

Dead End (dir. William Wyler, 1937). Poverty, gentrification, and adolescent criminality on East 53rd Street. I hadn’t seen this movie in decades, and I was dismayed by how badly it’s aged. Humphrey Bogart and Joel McCrea now seem wooden, and the Dead End Kids seem insufferable caricatures. But there’s Sylvia Sidney as a fetching shopgirl on strike, and Gregg Toland’s cinematography is dazzling in a chase sequence across rooftops and through shadows. ★★☆☆

*

Stage Fright (dir. Afred Hitchcock, 1950). Understated, slyly playful metafiction, with Jane Wyman as an aspiring actress (“You don’t look like an actress,” she’s told) who takes on a real-life role to solve a whodunit. Many comic touches, and a sinister turn from Marlene Dietrich as a louche entertainer. (Did she or didn’t she?) The ending, with strong overtones of The 39 Steps, is spectacular, literally. ★★★★

*

Rembrandt (dir. Alexander Korda, 1936). I’ve never been much for what I call period movies (anything set before the twentieth century). But I can make an exception for this one, which stars Charles Laughton as a painter utterly devoted to his work, spending his few coins on brushes and paints as an alcoholic might spend them on whiskey. Anecdotal and episodic, with only one canvas on display (which saves the movie from and-then-I-painted montony). With Gertrude Lawrence and Elsa Lanchester, and with extraordinary sets by Vincent Korda. ★★★★

*

Miracle in the Rain (dir. Rudolph Maté, 1956). A strange amalgam: New York as a lovers’ playground, life in wartime, existential despair, and supernatural forces. I said to Elaine that the story could have come from a Paul Harvey broadcast. So I’m not surprised to learn that the source is a novella (by Ben Hecht) first published in The Saturday Evening Post. The film has been widely panned, but the chameleonic Jane Wyman, the doughty Eileen Heckart, the New York location shots, and the story’s fablelike strangeness are powerfully redeeming virtues. ★★★★

*

Italianamerican (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1974). The director’s parents, Catherine and Charles, talking in the living room, dining room, and kitchen of their apartment on Elizabeth Street, Little Italy. Life itself, complete with plastic covers for the furniture and a recipe for sauce. “I have a brother whose name is Salvatore. They called him Charlie.” ★★★★

*

The Last Waltz (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1978). Yes, it was Scorsese night on Turner Classics. The Band in a farewell performance, tight and loose, an incredible group of instrumentalists. The guest performers — who included Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joni Mitchell, the Staples, and Muddy Waters — recall an era of eclectic taste (and audiences willing to listen, no pyrotechnics needed). The saddest thing about this film: the unmistakable signs, in so many scenes, that substances are everywhere. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)