Twelve movies

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

Claudine (dir. John Berry, 1974). Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones star as Claudine, a domestic worker and mother of six, and Roop, a charming garbage man. Their improbable first date blossoms into a relationship that seems destined to weather all challenges. The film was marketed as a comedy, but the mood shifts frequently, with considerable room made for social woes and commentary thereupon. Shark jump: one of the characters (not Roop) gets a vasectomy. ★★★

*

The Royal Tenenbaums (dir. Wes Anderson, 2001). Having reread all of J.D. Salinger, I wanted to see this film again to look for the Salinger overtones, which I vaguely remembered were supposed to be there. And they are: in the name Tenenbaum (the married name of Glass daughter Boo Boo is Tannenbaum), in the family of wunderkinder, in the sorrows at the heart of family life, in Margot’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) fur coat, cigarettes, and bathroom retreats (shades of Franny and Zooey). But these are surface elements. The Tenenbaums in other respects are wholly themselves, fragile, dysfunctional, and at home. ★★★★

*

Danger Zone (dir. William Berke, 1951). It appears on a DVD titled Forgotten Noir — forgotten for good reason. This B-movie stars Hugh Beaumont as a fellow who runs a charter-boat business but spends more time involved in capers. Capers, plural: the movie is made of two utterly separate stories, which sound to me as if they began life as episodes of a radio serial. Fun to hear Beaumont talk like someone from a Raymond Chandler novel, and fun to see Tom Neal (of Detour) as a hood, but this film is little more than a curiosity. ★

*

The Big Chase (dir. Arthur Hilton and Robert L. Lippert Jr., 1954). Also forgotten, and not even close to noir, with a veteran cop telling the story of a rookie who chases down a criminal gang (the gang includes Lon Chaney Jr., who doesn’t speak a single line). The chase, which takes up almost twenty minutes of this hour-long movie, involves cars, boats, a helicopter, and a second director, but it’s sadly lacking in suspense. The production values at times recall Ed Wood: watch the opening scene for instant confirmation, as the veteran cop offers a cigarette to a visitor, who declines, after which the cop removes two cigarettes from a pack, lets one roll off his desk, lights the other, which is unlit in subsequent shots, and then lights his cigarette a second time. One redeeming feature: many shots of plain, unglamorous Los Angeles, wide boulevards, auto repair shops, billboards, and fences. ★

*

Vivre sa vie (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1962). The story made me think of Zola — a woman’s slide from store clerk to prostitute. The intertitles, separating twelve short segments, made me think of silent films and Brecht’s epic theater: we know what will happen before it does (a meta kind of determinism). The café conversation about speech and writing made me think of Brassai (the camera angle) and Derrida. Seeing Anna Karina for the first time made me think of the other times I’ve come to someone’s work only after they’re gone. ★★★★

*

Jane Wants a Boyfriend (dir. William Sullivan, 2015).
Jane (Louisa Krause), who mends and tends to costumes for a theatrical company, is a young woman on the autism spectrum. Her sister Bianca (Eliza Dushku) is an actess with the same company. Alas, this film again and again places its focus on Bianca (and her journalist boyfriend, and her friends, and her role in A MIdsummer Night’s Dream, and her cranky director), when Jane and her misadventures and adventures in dating would be the appropriate focus. Perhaps the movie should have been called Jane’s Sister Wants Equal Time. ★★★

*

Small Town Christmas (dir. Maclain Nelson, 2018). We had to watch one Hallmark Christmas movie straight (and I do mean straight) through. Here, bestselling newbie writer Nell Phillips ends her book tour in the two-bit small town that inspired her novel, a town she’s never before visited, where she reconnects with handsome former co-worker Emmett Turner, whose stories of Christmas inspired her writing and who ghosted years ago when they both lived in the big city and were supposed to go on a date. Emmett now runs the town’s bookstore (named for his late sister, Paige Turner), and he has an explanation for why he ghosted, a good one. The best name here though belongs not to a character but to an actor: Preston Vanderslice, who plays the obligatory developer out to alter a town’s way of life. ★★

*

Wuthering Heights (dir. William Wyler, 1939). The 1958 television production prompted our household to read the novel, which in turn prompted us to watch this version. I think 1958 does a better job of suggesting (if only suggesting) the novel’s larger-than-life-and-death sado-masochistic torments. As Heathcliff and Catherine, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon are too restrained. But still, they’re Olivier and Oberon, and David Niven as Edgar Linton makes a perfect beta-male to Heathcliff’s alpha. ★★★★

*

Little Women (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2019). I came to this movie as a novice, recalling little more than Beth’s death in the 1994 version, so my judgment is unclouded by prior allegiance, unaided by prior knowledge. The acting is almost uniformly excellent, though Florence Pugh looks like a time traveler, ready to text the future at any moment. The decision to tell the story in a non-linear way baffles me, as it leaves the film, early on, with little momentum — just one vignette after another. My favorite scenes: the brief conversation about anger between Jo (Saoirse Ronan) and Marmee (Laura Dern), and the montage of Jo writing in the attic (even though her handwriting looks like something from the inspirational wall art sold at Wal-Mart). ★★★

*

The Public (dir. Emilio Estevez, 2018). Any movie about library life is a movie I’ll root for. This one has good intentions: Estevez plays a librarian who finds himself in deep sympathy with the homeless men who refuse to leave a Cincinnati library for a night outdoors in brutally low temperatures. Estevez and other cast members really look like library people. But too much is contrived or questionable here: the all-male occupying force, the absence of tobacco and substances, the near-absence of alcohol, a sub-plot with a city official’s family, and a bit of performance art that left me saying yeesh. ★★

*

Danger Signal (dir. Robert Florey, 1945). Faye Emerson is Hilda Fenchurch, a bespectacled public stenographer and typist, taking dictation and typing at the office, and then typing some more at home, where she lives with her mother. Zachary Scott is Ronnie Mason, a ne’er-do-well — or worse — writer who takes a room as a boarder in the Fenchurch house, where he ingratiates himself with Hilda, Hilda’s younger sister, and their mother. Strong echoes of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, but the film doesn’t fulfill its promise. What appears to be a significant plot device (a ring, as in Hitchcock) ends up forgotten, and the ending is too abrupt and improbable to satisfy. ★★★

*

Safety Last! (dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923). Here’a a genius at work. Harold Lloyd is “The Boy,” a young man looking to make good in a Los Angeles department-store. His brilliant scheme: have a friend climb the building, which will bring hundreds of people to the store. Endlessly inventive comedy, on the selling floor and up in the air, with many genuine thrills. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)