Twelve movies

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

The Unknown (dir. Tod Browning, 1927). Lon Chaney is an armless knife thrower in a gypsy circus. Joan Crawford is his assistant. Norman Kerry is the circus strongman. Yes, it’s a love triangle, with a startling surprise, a grotesque plot twist, and a suspenseful ending. ★★★★

*

Miss Annie Rooney (dir. Edwin L. Marin, 1942). How sad to be fourteen and making a comeback in the movies. But here’s Shirley Temple as Little Annie Rooney, a teenager in modest circumstances, hep to the jive and up on the latest records, suddenly finding herself in the swank world of wealthy nerdish Marty White (Dickie Moore), his snooty friends, and his family. Will jitterbug lessons and a process to produce artificial rubber triumph over rigid class distinctions? You get just one guess. ★★

*

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (dir. George C. Wolfe, 2020). Though I was put off by the trailer, whose bits of music have little to do with Ma Rainey, I wanted to like this movie, and I really tried. But what I see is an ensemble of fine actors lost to an overwrought stage-bound script, a computer-generated Chicago, and pointless distractions (the mysterious door, sex on an upright piano). Chadwick Boseman gives a powerful performance as a cornetist who speaks of new directions in music and last things; Viola Davis as Rainey is sometimes imposing, sometimes comical, but often absent from the story that takes its title from one of her songs. My favorite scene is a quiet one in which Rainey and trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo) talk about the value of music: “The more music you have in the world, the fuller it is.” ★★★

*

The Old Dark House (dir. James Whale, 1932). Less than a minute in, and it’s clear we’re watching a precursor of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We shift between genuine scares and laughs, as two cars’ worth of sophisticated travelers spend a stormy night with the (ahem) Femm family. Horace F. (Ernest Thesiger), Rebecca F. (Eva Moore), Sir Roderick F. (Elspeth Dudgeon, a female actor), and Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) add an unmistakable queer subtext to the proceedings. Morgan (Boris Karloff) and Saul F. (Brember Wills) made me think of the great documentary Brother’s Keeper (dir. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1992). ★★★★

*

The Black Cat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934). Massively bizarre: another stormy night with travelers taking refuge in an isolated house, this one designed and furnished in an ultramodern manner. Boris Karloff, its owner, is an architect and Satanist; Bela Lugosi is a psychiatrist and his antagonist. The bizarreness — a flaying, an attempted human sacrifice, bodies in suspended animation — makes up for the incoherence of the plot. Edgar Allan Poe, whose name appears in the credits (“suggested by”), had nothing to do with this effort. ★★★★

*

Detour (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945). In the trenches of academia, faculty and staff are forever exhorted to do more with less. Few directors did more with less with Edgar G. Ulmer. Dig the silence as Al (Tom Neal) does virtuoso work at the piano; dig the nonexistent cityscape as he walks in the fog; and dig the light on his face in the diner. My favorite creepy image: Vera’s (Ann Savage) frozen profile as she rides with the man whose life she’ll destroy. ★★★★

*

The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder, 1960). I’m proud of TCM for recognizing that The Apartment is indeed a Christmas movie. Overtones of Huck and Jim: Mr. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is going to save Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), and returning the washroom key is his “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The raft of the Baxter apartment will be a refuge, at least for a while. Hard to fathom that Fred MacMurray stepped into the dreck of My Three Sons mere months after his great performance here as a glib, heartless fraud. ★★★★

*

The World of Henry Orient (dir. George Roy Hill, 1964). I’ve long thought of this movie in the company of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A Thousand Clowns: Manhattan as a playground for free spirits, with dark clouds here and there. Peter Sellers stars as Henry Orient, a pianist and ladies’ man whose foreign accent slips again and again back to Brooklyn. But the movie belongs to his young stalkers, Val and Gil (Elizabeth Walker and Merrie Spaeth), whose imaginative flights turn Orient into a figure of innocent, comically cult-like devotion — until innocence gives way to painful realizations. With Tom Bosley, Angela Lansbury, Bibi Osterwald, Paula Prentiss, Phyllis Thaxter, and Central Park in winter. ★★★★

*

The Shop at Sly Corner (dir. George King, 1947). Oskar Homolka stars as an antiques dealer, doing business on a sinisterly dark and narrow London street. He appears at first to be an old-world widower, all cigars and pince-nez, doting on his daughter (Muriel Pavlow), a rising violinist. But there’s more to his shop than we might at first suspect — if that sinister darkness didn’t tip us off. Understated but gripping suspense. ★★★★

*

Three by Robert Siodmak

Christmas Holiday (1944). The title points in one direction, but the director’s name points in another. A noirish story of lost souls in New Orleans, as a singer (Deanna Durbin) tells her life story to a serviceman (Dean Harens) stuck in town because of bad weather. The villain of the piece: Gene Kelly (really). The most remarkable scenes: the concert hall, the church on Christmas Eve. ★★★★

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945). At the center of the film: the remnants of an old New Hampshire textile family, unassuming brother Harry (George Sanders) and his sisters Lettie and Hester (Geraldine Fitzgerald, Moyna MacGill). Into this celibate world steps a glamorous visitor from the New York office (Ella Raines), and her relationship with Harry threatens to upend the siblings’ house. Suggestions of incestuous desire are unmistakable here. The conclusion, even if dictated by a censor, is still compelling in its suggestion of what could — and why not? — have happened. ★★★★

The Dark Mirror (1946). A tour de force for Olivia de Havilland. Did she or didn’t she kill a doctor found dead in his apartment? It’s complicated. With Lew Ayres as a dapper psychiatrist and James Mitchell as a rumbled police lieutenant. ★★★★

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All OCA film posts (Pinboard)