Twelve movies

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

Treasure Island (dir. Victor Fleming, 1934). I hadn’t seen this film since boyhood and did not remember how genuinely good it is. Jackie Cooper as young Jim Hawkins is a great asset here: listen to his voice and you’ll hear him as a plaintive boy version of Shirley Temple. But it’s the pirates that make the movie, a collection of grotesques, above all, Lionel Barrymore’s delirious Billy Bones and Wallace Beery’s conniving Long John Silver. Were Robert Louis Stevenson and Victor Fleming, like Blake’s Milton, of the Devil’s party without knowing it? ★★★★

*

Johnny Allegro (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). As a florist, George Raft is John Allegro (yes, George Raft, a florist). But as a fellow with a criminal past, he’s Johnny. His past gets him entangled in a criminal enterprise with the desirable Glenda Chapman (Nina Foch) and the unhinged Morgan Vallin (George Macready). Foch and Macready, the one understated, the other over the top, help to compensate for Raft’s trademark stiffness. ★★★

*

Two by Vincent Minnelli

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). A movie producer (Walter Pidgeon) conducts a Socratic dialogue about exploitative movie producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) with three of the people whose lives Shields ruined: an actress (Lana Turner), a director (Barry Sullivan), and a writer (Dick Powell). Or were they ruined? Great acting, great storytelling via flashbacks, great black and white cinematography by Robert Surtees, a great score by David Raksin, and Gloria Grahame in an Academy Award-winning performance as a southern lady. It’s “the movies,” and even in 2021, it’s fairly easy to figure out at least some of the real-life models for the characters. ★★★★

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). Not a sequel but a companion, with Douglas as a washed-up actor and Edward G. Robinson as a washed-up director, each holding on to meager career prospects in Rome. Cyd Charisse, George Hamilton, Dahlia Lavi, and Claire Trevor complicate the actor-director dynamic. I prefer the sharp and snappy 1952 world; too many outbursts make this movie campy by comparison. Best scene: Douglas’s character watching “himself” in The Bad and the Beautiful; worst: the car. ★★★

*

Salesman (dir. Albert Maysles and David Maysles, 1969). Four salesmen — the Badger, the Gipper, the Rabbit, and the Bull — travel from door to door (“I’m from the church”), pushing enormous illustrated Bibles on Catholic households. There’s something hilarious and repulsive about the use of the most hackneyed, high-pressure sales tactics to push these behemoths ($49.95 for the base model, $357.97 in today’s money) on households of modest means. And there’s something immensely sad about this documentary, particularly in the person of the bitter, hapless, wise-cracking monologist Paul Brennan, the Badger, who emerges as the star. Best and worst scene: Charles McDevitt, the Gipper, trying to “spark up” the Badger. ★★★★

*

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life (dir. Ric Burns, 2020). I’m a fan: I admire the neurologist Oliver Sacks for his eccentric humanity and his ability to identify with and celebrate the humanity of others. This documentary is a fan too, a beautifully made account of Sacks’s life, made in the last months of his life. Anyone who knows Sacks only as a writer of curious case histories (or as the doctor played by Robin Williams in Awakenings) will learn of his painful family background (a schizophrenic brother, a mother who calls Oliver an “abomination” when she learns he’s gay), drug use, frequent professional rejection, profound shyness, and, in the end, a six-year loving relationship with a partner. In lieu of a fourth sentence, I’ll point the reader to a short essay Sacks wrote for The New York Times after receiving a terminal diagnosis: “My Own Life.” ★★★★

*

The Mark (dir. Guy Green, 1961). A compassionate, deeply unnerving (because compassionate) portrait of a man who’s served time for “child seduction,” now attempting to make a new life for himself. Jim Fuller (Stuart Whitman) is an American in Manchester, England, working in accountancy thanks to a benevolent boss and a group that helps released prisoners. Complications develop when he begins a relationship with the firm’s secretary (Maria Schell). Rod Steiger, blessedly understated here, plays the psychiatrist who serves as Fuller’s lifeline. ★★★★

*

Two by Joseph Losey

The Servant (1963). From a novel by Robin Maugham, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. A drama of host and parasite, with a manservant (Dirk Bogarde) taking over the household of a boozy aristocrat (James Fox). Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig provide various forms of support. One of the darkest films I’ve seen. ★★★★

Accident (1967). From a novel by Nicholas Mosley, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. Silences, miscues, non sequiturs, and ominous tension, with an Oxford philosophy prof (Dirk Bogarde), an academic rival (Stanley Baker), and an aristocratic student (Michael York) all under the spell of an Austrian student and princess (Jacqueline Sassard). But it would be misleading to say that the movie is “about” that. Better, perhaps: it’s about the ways in which people step on one another, figuratively and literally. ★★★★

*

FBI Girl (dir. William A. Berke, 1951). Cesar Romero and George Brent star as agents investigating the murder of an FBI clerk; Audrey Totter is the late clerk’s roommate; and Raymond Burr lurks as a sinister figure on the payroll of a shady governor. So far so good, but this movie has nothing compelling in its action. Just wait for the scene in which the characters watch TV (and look for a young Peter Marshall on the small screen). This movie puts the udg in low-budget. ★

*

Little Caesar (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1931). The rise and fall of Caesar Enrico Bandello (Edward G. Robinson), a small-time hood determined to be “somebody.” Robinson is great, of course. I paid attention to the movie’s atmosphere: the lonely diner, serving spaghetti and coffee at midnight; the enormous interiors, some modernist, some weirdly baroque. And I was impressed by the economy and speed of the storytelling: a car, filmed from a distance, pulls up at a gas station, the doors open, the station’s lights go out, shots are fired, a cash register dings — and then we’re having spaghetti and coffee. ★★★★

*

That’s Life! (dir. Blake Edwards, 1986). Featured in the Criterion Channel’s collection Close to Home: How to Make a Movie Without Leaving the House — here, the house of Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, filled with glitzy people, some played by family members, all gathering for a birthday party. Andrews plays a singer married to the birthday boy, a kvetching architect about to turn sixty (Jack Lemmon almost parodying Jack Lemmon). Sex jokes, prostate jokes, and bowel jokes are all on the menu. Andrews’s character’s stoicism as she waits through a weekend for biopsy results was, for me, the movie’s one virtue. ★★

[Sources: the Criterion Channel, PBS, TCM, and YouTube.]

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