Twelve movies

[Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

The Lost Moment (dir. Martin Gabel, 1947). Gothic noir, from Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. A scheming publisher (too-bland Robert Cummings) in search of a dead Shelley-like poet’s love letters wangles his way into a house of the poet’s 105-year-old beloved (Agnes Moorehead). A niece (Susan Hayward) provides romantic interest in the present. Eeriest moment: the hand on the arm of the chair. ★★★

*

Shadow on the Wall (dir. Pat Jackson, 1950). A satisfying thriller, in which a young girl (Gigi Perreau) is the key to solving a murder. Can a kind psychiatrist (Nancy Davis) unlock the child’s memory? Perreau and Davis are both excellent, as is Ann Sothern, cast in an unusual role. This noirish film is unusual in a more important respect: a girl and two women are front and center, with male characters entirely secondary. ★★★★

*

The Last Wave (dir. Peter Weir, 1977). A clash — or merger — of cultures, as a Sydney lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) defends a group of Aboriginal men accused of murder and begins to experience troubling visions. Everything here is suffused with dread: the most ordinary domestic interior seems to portend doom. And it’s doom on a grand scale: the vision of tidal apocalypse seems more timely now than ever. This film would pair well with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. ★★★★

*

The Face Behind the Mask (dir. Robert Florey, 1941). Chameleonic Peter Lorre: think of how much his appearance changes just in his earlier years, from the killer in M to Dr. Gogol in Mad Love to Mr. Moto to Joel Cairo to Ugarte. Here he plays Janos Szabo, an immigrant who turns to a life of crime after being horribly disfigured in a fire (thus the mask). Don Beddoe and Evelyn Keyes are strong in supporting roles. The plot is sometimes wobbly, but the bizarro ending almost makes up for it. ★★★

*

A Man Called Ove (dir. Hannes Holm, 2015). Ove is an elderly curmudgeon and recent widower whose attempts to end his life go wrong as the world around him intrudes. Everything in his story, told in a series of flashbacks, is predictable, as is the revelation that the curmudgeon has a softer side. But it’s all pleasant enough, in a better-than-Hallmark way. My favorite line: “Antingen dör vi — eller så lever vi” [Either we die — or we live]. ★★★

[I will add a sentence that has closed many New York Times articles: If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.]

*

Ida Lupino, Ida Lupino, Ida Lupino

Not Wanted (dir. Elmer Clifton and Ida Lupino, 1949). Between 1949 and 1953, Ida Lupino wrote and/or directed several socially conscious films. This one follows the plight of Sally Kelton. a young unmarried woman (Sally Forrest), pregnant after a brief encounter with sketchy pianist Steve Ryan (Leo Penn). Drew Baxter is the good guy (Keefe Brasselle) who’s crazy about Sally and finds her in a home for unwed mothers. The film reaches a resolution that had our household in tears. ★★★★

Never Fear (dir. Ida Lupino, 1950). Forrest and Brasselle as a dance team whose female member contracts polio. The film then moves from nightclubs to the Kabat-Kaiser Institute and intensive physical therapy. Making this film must have been deeply important to Lupino, who contracted polio in 1934. Two extraordinary dance sequences (one with Forrest and Brasselle, one with a group in wheelchairs), but the chemistry between the leads isn’t nearly as strong here as in Not Wanted. ★★★

[Remarkable: in neither film is there a question of how someone will pay for care. It’s just there, as health care should be.]

The Trouble with Angels (dir. Ida Lupino, 1966). Well, this film too is Ida Lupino. Rosalind Russell is the no-nonsense Mother Superior at a boarding school for girls; Hayley Mills and June Harding are the new arrivals who break the rules again and again. Good performances all around, though the pranks and punishments get a bit tiresome, and there’s very little of “school” to be seen. Is it a spoiler to say that I called the ending well in advance? ★★★

*

They Shall Not Grow Old (dir. Peter Jackson, 2018). The Great War from a British perspective: archival footage, restored and colored, with the recorded voices of veterans describing their experiences from enlistment to war’s end. The film gives the viewer not the story of a particular battle but the story of battle, in all particulars — what men wore, what they ate, how they trained, how they fought, how they died. If I were still teaching, I’d show this film alongside the Iliad. An extraordinary labor of love and respect. ★★★★

*

This Ain’t No Mouse Music! (dir. Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon, 2014). The story of Chris Strachwitz, the German immigrant who fell in love with indigenous American musics and founded Arhoolie Records. The documentary tracks five of Strachwitz’s varied musical interests: blues, bluegrass, norteño, Cajun music, and New Orleans jazz. Strachwitz: “I was not conscious that this was any kind of cultural preservation; I just dove into this like a guy diving into a swimming pool, having a great adventure underwater or whatever, or going to paradise without having to suffer death.” My favorite moment: Ry Cooder talking about hearing, as a fourteen year-old, BIg Joe Williams’s “Sloppy Drunk Blues” (an Arhoolie recording) and realizing there was a lot in the world that he, Cooder, didn’t understand. ★★★★

*

Monrovia, Indiana (dir. Frederick Wiseman, 2018). This meandering portrait of a tiny rural town is certainly the most beautiful Wiseman documentary I’ve seen, full of bluer-than-blue skies and green corn, and minus what I call the Midwestern Sublime of dead fields and sheer emptiness. And because it’s a Wiseman film, without voiceover, without intertitles, much more is missing: any sense of the town’s economic well-being, its employment opportunities (I’d love to hear a young adult’s take), the meaning of what residents call “Homestead” (a subdivision? a subsidized-housing development?), the effect of the town’s proximity to Bloomington and Indianapolis, the town’s overwhelming support for Donald Trump in 2016, which can be inferred from the decals for sale in a street vendor’s display. The film’s purpose, as a blurb on the distributor’s website suggests, is to show big-city types just how good these people in the heartland are. Some scenes of life without irony — the basketball lecture, the Masonic ritual, the bench and hydrant debates — seem straight from a Christopher Guest film. ★★

*

Girlfriends (dir. Claudia Weill, 1978). A freelance photographer (Melanie Mayron) is trying to make it, as they said, and still say, in New York City. But it’s the 1970s, and it’s possible for a freelance photographer and her aspiring writer friend (Anita Skinner) to afford a two-bedroom apartment as they navigate young adulthood. The dialogue is sometimes stilted; the acting, sometimes wooden; but the movie is — somehow — an affecting picture of life in that time and place. Watch for Christopher Guest as a creepy boyfriend. ★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)