Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Motherless Brooklyn (dir. Edward Norton, 2019). Norton stars as Motherless Brooklyn, a ticcing private detective (born in Brooklyn, then orphaned, thus the nickname) whose effort to uncover the truth about his mentor’s murder leads him to the heart of municipal corruption and personal scandal. This film feels interminable at first but picks up considerably with the entry of Alec Baldwin as Moses Randolph, a thinly disguised and highly Trumpian version of Robert Moses, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Laura Rose, a citizen who fights against so-called urban renewal with Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones), a thinly disguised version of Jane Jacobs. Alas, the film tries hard to check all boxes (detective has an audience with Mr. Big, detective arranges to meet someone and finds a dead body, detective begins an inevitable romance) and thus always seems like it’s trying to be noir. Bonus: Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire ’s Omar Little) as a thinly disguised, unnamed version of Miles Davis. ★★★

*

Moontide (dir. Archie Mayo, 1942). It went into the Netflix queue because of Jean Gabin and Ida Lupino, and I was happily surprised by how good — and strange — this film is. Bobo (Gabin) is a longshoreman who falls in with unemployed waitress Anna (Lupino). Waterfront types Tiny (Thomas Mitchell) and Nutsy (Claude Rains) are visitors to the bait barge where Bobo and Anna have made a home of sorts. Terrible events lurk in the past, and terrible events are to come, all presented in a stagey, dream-like setting, with brilliant effects of light and fog. ★★★★

*

Sapphire (dir. Basil Dearden, 1959). A police procedural with a focus on race in British culture, with two (white) detectives moving through white and black London to solve the murder of a beautiful young woman. The film is so steeped in casual racism — sometimes blatant, sometimes more genteel — that it’s possible to imagine any of the principals having committed murder. Most interesting scene: the visit to International Club, the one place in the film where humankind in all its varieties is welcome and at home. Sapphire is the third Dearden film we’ve seen (after All Night Long and Victim). ★★★★

*

Cold War (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski, 2018). Love and doom across decades and borders, in a story set in Poland, East Germany, France, Yugoslavia, Poland, and elsewhere. Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), composer, pianist, director of a state-sponsored folk-music ensemble, meets Zula (Joanna Kulig), singer, at an audition. What might have been a bittersweet episode consigned to memory becomes a relationship revived again and again, with ever more terrible consequences. The already harrowing story becomes more harrowing when you learn that it’s inspired by the relationship of the director’s parents. ★★★★

*

Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405 (dir. Frank Stiefel, 2016). My library now requires the completion of an online form for a Kanopy film (the cost to have all films available to stream is prohibitive), so for “Reason” I typed “Curiosity,” and that was enough. Thank you, library. This is a beautifully made short documentary about Mindy Alper, a Los Angeles artist who turns her childhood traumas and psychiatric struggles into profound pen-and-ink drawings and papier-mâché sculptures. My favorite line: “I wish to want to make art.” ★★★★

*

Crossing Delancey (dir. Joan Micklin Silver, 1988). Isabelle, or Izzy (Amy Irving), works at a tony Upper West Side bookstore, in awe of the writers who gather there, including alpha-male Anton (Jeroen Krabbé). But down on the Lower East Side, Izzy’s bubbie (Reizl Bozyk) and a matchmaker (Sylvia Miles) have another man in mind for Izzy: a plainspoken, unassuming mensch, Sam the pickle man (Peter Riegert). If Izzy could only figure out that she’s a character in a film, everything that you know is going to happen would happen a lot sooner — but where would be the fun in that? Favorite moments: the utterly pompous literary “soiree,” with Rosemary Harris channeling (I think) Elsa Lanchester as the eccentric painter in The Big Clock; the mix of Run-D.M.C. and “Some Enchanted Evening” in Gray’s Papaya; Benny Goodman playing on what must be a magical radio. ★★★

*

The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story (dir. Gregory V. Sherman and Jeffrey C. Sherman, 2009). I knew in a vague way that Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman were the sound of Disney: “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and all that. I didn’t know that their songwriting also included, say, “You’re Sixteen” (a hit for Johnny Burnette and, years later, Ringo Starr). Filled with interviews and clips from movies, this documentary tells a story of musical collaboration and brotherly alienation, though just what went wrong between the Shermans is never really explained (but it’s easy to guess). The filmmakers are their fathers’ sons, working together, which suggests some element of next-generation healing. ★★★★

*

The Mask of Dimitrios (dir. Jean Negulesco, 1944). For years, never having seen this movie, I’ve had a bit of nonsense from it in my head, something I read somewhere, something about Algerian coffee: “It takes a little longer to prepare it, but I prefer it.” The premise is pretty plain: a meek and mild writer of mysteries (Peter Lorre) uncovering the story of the dead criminal Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott) teams up with a suave criminal (Sydney Grenstreet) who is also on the Dimitrios trail. Flashbacks follow, but alas, there’s nothing especially interesting about Dimitrios or the big plot twist — painfully obvious, and yet a mystery writer misses it. But I liked the movie for its atmosphere (that staircase!), its Maltese Falcon overtones, the chance to see Lorre and Greenstreet as a serio-comic duo, and the opportunity to finally hear the line about — is there such a thing? — Algerian coffee. ★★

*

Wuthering Heights (dir. Daniel Petrie, 1958). A television adaptation from The DuPont Show of the Month, rediscovered and recently aired on TCM. Richard Burton and Rosemary Harris are an excellent partnership as Heathcliff and Catherine. The sets are spare, the camera is right in the actors’ faces, and somehow the larger-than-life performances seem strangely suited to the small screen. I give major props to the mid-century American culture that found Emily Brontë suitable for prime-time television. ★★★★

*

Being Canadian (dir. Robert Cohen, 2015). Cohen, a writer for television comedies, does something of a Michael Moore imitation, going on a road trip in search of what it means to be Canadian. As I watched this documentary, I thought of a moment from a long-ago graduate seminar: as we went around the room introducing ourselves, our prof asked one student, “And you are?” and she replied, “Canadian.” Apologies, diffidence, and self-deprecation are on full view here, but the film is little more than an increasingly tedious shtick, with too many comedians, too much belaboring the obvious (maple syrup, maple syrup), and a forced last-minute epiphany. Margaret Atwood, Glenn Gould, Joni Mitchell, Alice Munro, Neil Young: there’s no sign of their Canada here. ★

*

Berlin Express (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1948). The first time I watched, I followed the plot. This time I had a better chance to marvel at the locations, as the film was made largely in post-war Frankfurt. Remarkable to see Merle Oberon and Robert Ryan and company striding past and into the ruins. A bonus in this brilliant movie: the two clowns. ★★★★

*

The Limits of Control (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2009). I can make sense of it, of some of it, some sense of some of it, if I have to. The protagonist, known in the credits as Lone Man (Isaach de Bankolé), is, I think, a character in “the movies,” in costume, taking direction, moving through Spain as he completes tasks and has a series of (one-sided) conversations with colorful cameo-appearance strangers. Lone Man’s mission seems to be the destruction of some Burroughsian Reality Studio (“Break though in Grey Room,” I kept recalling). Beautiful landscapes and one extraordinary moment of flamenco, but overall, a slog. ★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

[The phrase “Break though in Grey Room” appears in William Burroughs’s three cut-up novels: Nova Express, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded. After-the-fact discovery: Jarmusch’s title comes from an essay by Burroughs.]