Twelve movies

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

The Fat Man (dir. William Castle, 1951). A one-off film with J. Scott Smart reprising his radio serial role as Brad Runyon, bon vivant, gourmet, and detective. The character is said to have been inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, but Runyon seems to me more the Nero Wolfe type. He dines, dances (very well), and investigates the murder of a dentist, all the while looking like John Candy with a fake moustache. A wonderful B-movie with a zillion flashbacks, along with Rock Hudson, Emmett Kelly, and Julie London. ★★★★

*

Trapped (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1949). A semi-documentary story of Treasury agents and counterfeiters? I’m sold. Lloyd Bridges is the nominal star, but the movie’s more compelling presences are John Hoyt as a louche nightclub denizen and the ill-fated Barbara Paxton as a cigarette girl. Three great touches: chewing gum, an apartment where Latin music plays non-stop, and a chase through a Los Angeles streetcar depot. ★★★★

*

Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (dir. Stuart Heisler, 1947). Susan Hayward stars as Angelica Conway, a nightclub singer who career disappears when her songwriting husband Ken (Lee Bowman) becomes a star himself. Angelica’s descent into alcoholism is fueled by loneliness and suspicions about Ken and his catty assistant Martha (Marsha Hunt). Some great scenes: Angelica and Martha sparring at a party, Angelica and Robert Shayne in a bar; Angelica preparing a meal for her daughter. Bowman is the weak link, but Hayward gives a great (Lupino-esque, I’d say) performance in a forward-looking film that treats alcoholism as a disease. ★★★★

*

Once You Kiss a Stranger. . . (dir. Robert Sparr, 1969). A reimagining of Strangers on a Train, with Paul Burke (beloved in our household from the television series Naked City) as a pro golfer and Carol Lynley as the Bruno Anthony of the piece. Burke is fine as a man in over his head, but the movie is a tour de force for Lynley, by turns seductive, vicious, witty, but always insane. Also featuring a portable TV, an eight-track tape player, an enormous VCR, flocked wallpaper, and a car chase in the Valley (the Valley, always recognizable). With Whit Bissell as a brave psychiatrist and Philip Carey (who played the gay football player on All in the Family) as an egomaniacal golfer. ★★★★

*

Sex and the Single Girl (dir. Richard Quine, 1964). This movie and the previous one remind me how rarely I watch anything from this decade. (Elaine says our best year for movies is 1949 — or is it 1947?) Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis are delightful in this comedy of assumed and mistaken identities; Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda, less so; Fran Jeffries and Mel Ferrer, much less so; the car chase, much, much less so. The sexual politics (get her drunk) are intolerable; the coyness — a man who has lost his, uhh, “confidence”; a woman who was “active” before marriage, that is, employed — insufferable. ★★

*

Rancho Notorious (dir. Fritz Lang, 1952). Another Criterion Channel noir western. “Legend of Chuck-A-Luck,” a song that runs through the movie, spells out the theme with an awkward redundancy: “hate, murder, and revenge.” No matter: after a brutal beginning, the story follows a ranch-hand (Arthur Kennedy) as he searches for the unknown bad man who raped and murdered his fiancée, ending up at last at Chuck-A-Luck, a ranch and haven for criminals presided over by a vaguely Circe-like Marlene Dietrich. The best line: “I wish you’d go away and come back ten years ago.” ★★★★

*

The Thin Man (dir. W.S. Van Dyke, 1934). The verbal and non-verbal communication between Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) is a delight, ditto the extended party scene, ditto the dinner scene, in which Nick improvises his way to figuring out who done it. The mystery and its cast of characters are not especially interesting, making this relatively short film feel much longer than its eighty minutes. Nora: “Want a drink?” Nick: “What do you think?” ★★★

*

The Two Mrs. Carrolls (dir. Peter Godfrey, 1947). Humphrey Bogart is a painter, of wives, not houses. The second Mrs. Carroll (Barbara Stanwyck) has two challenges to contend with: her husband and a wanna-be philanderer (Alexis Smith). Bogart is all unhinged emoting, but Stanwyck and Smith are well-matched as frenemies, the one anxious, the other cold and unflappable. A better leading man for this picture: James Mason. ★★★

*

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, aka The Hideaways (dir. Fielder Cook, 1973). The Afterschool Special to end all Afterschool Specials: siblings Claudia and Jamie (Sally Prager and Johnny Doran) run away to Manhattan to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I read E.L. Konigsburg’s novel for the first time as an adult and loved it. This adaptation, filmed on location, takes us inside Macy’s, the General Post Office Building, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art: O time capsule of Manahatta! Alas, the movie inexplicably veers away from the novel and disappoints when Mrs. Frankweiler (Ingrid Bergman) appears. ★★★

*

Two documentaries by Ron Mann

Imagine the Sound (1981). Music and conversation from four musicians identified with the avant-garde in jazz: Paul Bley, Bill Dixon, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor. To see these musicians on film is a rare thing. But there’s little here to orient a newcomer, and nothing in the way of structure: the film meanders between brief or extended samples of performance and brief or extended samples of conversation. Worst moments: Taylor reading his poetry; best moments: Taylor at the piano. ★★★

Poetry in Motion (1982). I first saw this film of poets talking and reading from the work in 1984, on a date with Elaine. Jim Carroll did an introduction (I recall that he spoke about people who died, among them, no doubt, his friend Ted Berrigan); the projector kept failing; and the audience was, let’s say, irreverent. All these years later, the moments I remember as best — Helen Adam, Amiri Baraka (with David Murray and Steve McCall), Ted Berrigan, Tom Waits — hold up well. But so much of what’s here points toward “spoken word” and the substitution of gestures, gimmickry, and poet voice for the magic of language. ★★★

*

Of Time and the City (dir. Terence Davies, 2008). A deeply personal Liverpool story, made of archival footage and Davies’s narration, which touches on everything from movies to growing up gay to the Beatles to royalty (“The Betty Windsor Show”) to the poverty of crumbling nineteenth-century buildings and new tower blocks. With copious citation and allusion, ranging from Sir Walter Raleigh to Ulysses and Four Quartets. If W.S. Sebald had set out to make a film, it might look something like this one. It’s brilliant film, soon leaving the Criterion Channel. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)