Twelve movies

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

Pope Michael (dir. Adam Fairholm, 2010). I went down a rabbit hole reading about “traditionalist Catholicism” and its extraordinary array of papal claimants. David Bawden, Pope Michael I, is one claimant, elected in 1990 by a conclave of six people, which included Bawden himself and his parents. We find this pope living with his mother in rural Kansas and mentoring a young man called to the priesthood in Michael’s One Holy Catholic Church. True believers, son, mother, and seminarian, brought to the screen on an excellent shoestring. ★★★★

[From Pope Michael. Save the date.]

[Watch for free here. The IMDb gives a running time of 1:26, but the film clocks in at 1:05. References in the description of the film to seminarians (plural) and a visit to a winery suggest to me that scenes were cut, perhaps at the request of the disaffected.]

*

Career Girls (dir. Mike Leigh, 1997). Annie (Lynda Steadman) comes to London to visit Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge), her flatmate from university. The movie shifts between their shared past and their reunion — their first meeting in six years. A funny, compassionate, sometimes heartbreaking examination of friendship, loneliness, and the ways in which friendships abide or fall away over time. It’s shocking to learn that Katrin Cartlidge died at the age of forty, a handful of years after this movie. ★★★★

*

Storm Fear (dir. Cornel Wilde, 1955). Hiding out and attempting an escape, against a background of mountains and deep snow. Bank robber Charlie Blake (Wilde) and his cohorts Benjie and Edna (Steven Hill, Lee Grant) have taken over the farmhouse of Charlie’s brother Fred (Dan Duryea), a sickly failed writer, who lives with his wife Elizabeth (Jean Wallace, Wilde’s wife in real life) and son David (David Stollery). Much tension, much resentment, and much overacting, as Benjie presses his challenge to Charlie’s authority and the Charlie–Elizabeth–Fred backstory becomes clear. Things improve enormously when we leave the farm for the mountains. ★★★

*

Escape in the Fog (dir. Oscar Boetticher Jr., 1945). The premise made me think of Vladimir Nabokov’s explorations of precognitive dreaming: a military nurse recovering from war trauma (Nina Foch) has a terrifying dream — and it comes true! The story is all espionage and enemy agents in San Francisco, with some creepy scenes in a watch-repair shop and an improbably delightful escape from death by gas. It’s always a delight to see Nina Foch, a versatile actor, here in the company of so-so William Wright and the much more impressive Otto Kruger and Konstantin Shayne. ★★★

*

The Big Steal (dir. Don Siegel, 1949). Not as good as Out of the Past, but it’s still a movie with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Mitchum plays Lieutenant Duke Halliday, United States Army, accused of stealing a company payroll. He’s both the chased and the chaser: chased by Captain Vincent Blake (William Bendix), and chasing Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles), the guy who has the money. Greer is Joan Graham, Fiske’s erstwhile girlfriend, who teams up with Halliday for chases and romantic banter down Mexico way. ★★★

*

House of Strangers (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949). Film noir, no, no matter what Wikipedia says. Family drama, yes, with Edward G. Robinson as Gino Monetti, proprietor of what might be called a DIY bank on the Lower East Side, lending to his fellow Italian-Americans at exorbitant rates. His four sons seethe, three with resentment, one with fanatical loyalty. Suffice to say that nothing good can come of that. Great performances from Luther Adler and Richard Conte. ★★★★

*

Buck Privates (dir. Arthur Lubin, 1941). I grew up on Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and I hadn’t seen one of their movies in many years, so I really wanted to like Buck Privates, but — meh. Routines arise out of no context; the Andrews Sisters sing and do their stiff-backed choreography; and a love triangle develops, with no resolution, among a snooty rich kid (Lee Bowman), a camp hostess (Jane Frazee), and the snooty rich kid’s chauffeur (Alan Curtis). Best bits: “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and the drill routine. In 2021 it’s impossible to watch this movie without recognizing its utter whiteness: the only person of color in the movie is a railway porter who calls himself “Uncle Sammy’s fair-haired boy.” ★★

*

Nomadland (dir. Chloé Zhao, 2020). Widowed and stuck in a dying town, Fern (Frances McDormand) takes to the road to join the nomadic subculture of vandwellers, picking up work here and there, bartering, sharing, and making do. Extraordinary landscapes, extraordinary humanity. With David Straithairn and many real-life nomads whose presence gives the movie a documentary feel. My favorite scenes: Fern’s conversations with nomads Swankie and Bob Wells about death and life. ★★★★

*

Some Came Running (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1958). Alcoholic writer manqué Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) returns to his Indiana hometown, where he finds familial dysfunction and melodrama. Great performances from Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine (as a heartbreakingly besotted party girl), Martha Hyer (as a sexually fearful schoolteacher), and even Dean Martin (as a behatted gambler). The story turns jumps a school of sharks in its final minutes, but I gather that the ending of James Jones’s novel is just as contrived. Filmed on location in Madison, Indiana. ★★★★

*

The Bedroom Window (dir. Curtis Hanson, 1987). An unmarried man, Terry, and a married woman, Sylvia (Steve Guttenberg, Isabelle Huppert), have just embarked on an affair when Sylvia sees, from Terry’s bedroom window, a man attacking a woman (Elizabeth McGovern) on the street. Pretty awkward for Sylvia, but what could go wrong if Terry calls the police and pretends that he witnessed the attack? A shameless, pleasurable take on Hitchcock — Rear Window, obviously, but also Psycho, Vertigo, Saboteur, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. The last twenty minutes turn into an inane semi-comic chase movie — thus three stars. ★★★

*

The Madonna’s Secret (dir. William Thiele, 1946). Sadly unmemorable: it wasn’t until the brief shot of a boat entering a boathouse, twenty minutes into the picture, that we realized we had seen this movie before. Credit John Alton’s cinematography for that striking image. A middling B-movie, with a painter (Francis Lederer) and his models, who keep turning up dead. Surprise realization: Francis Lederer was in Pandora’s Box. ★★

[The tell-tale boathouse.]

*

Le beau Serge (dir. Claude Chabrol, 1958). A dour young man, François (Jean-Claude Brialy), recovering from what seems to be tuberculosis, returns to his hometown of Sardent (Chabrol’s birthplace) to find his best friend Serge (Gérard Blain) a hapless alcoholic. Having read that the story was inspired by Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, I was utterly mistaken about what I might find here. What I did find: a story of dismal villagers and a life’s purpose found in self-sacrifice. Filmed in striking black-and-white by Henri Decaë. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

[Sources: Criterion Channel, Hulu, TCM, YouTube.]