Eleven movies, one mini-series

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Hulu, TCM, YouTube.]

Rope of Sand (dir. William Dieterle, 1949). Diamonds are the center of this story of greed, betrayal, and vengeance, set in South West Africa (now Namibia). A hunting guide (Burt Lancaster) knows where the stones are buried; a mining magnate (Claude Rains) wants to find out. Peter Lorre provides Casablanca-like atmosphere, and Paul Henreid is brilliant as the sadistic head of company security. The one weak link is Corinne Calvet as the seducer tasked with eliciting Lancaster’s secret: I’d say this movie needed Rita Hayworth. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Naked Road (dir. William Martin, 1959). The stuttery digitized version of The Naked Street (dir. Maxwell Shane, 1955) — a legit movie, with Anne Bancroft, Farley Granger, and Anthony Quinn — was difficult to watch, so we took The Naked Road instead. It’s the story of a model who’s held captive by two men intent on making her work for their “public relations” firm. Incredibly lw-bdgt — so lw-bdgt that there isn’t enough money to buy vowels. Faintly redeeming features: Ronald Long as a lw-bdgt Charles Laughton, and Jeanne Rainer (Jeanne Rejaunier), who has a pretty astonishing life story. ★ (YT)

*

Autumn Leaves (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1956). I must admit that until seeing Harriet Craig and this movie, I never realized what a great actor Joan Crawford was. Here she plays Milly Wetherby, a self-employed typist who finds her life changed when she shares her café table with the much younger Burt Hanson (Cliff Robertson). He’s charming, insistent, and, soon enough, devoted, but there’s more to his life than meets the eye. Most remarkable scene: Crawford appears to age at least a decade when she learns some surprising news about Burt’s past — and there’s more news to come. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Hell Bound (dir. William J. Hole Jr., 1957). Plays like a dollar-store version of The Asphalt Jungle: in other words, a perfectly plotted heist (here, of war-surplus narcotics) in which everything goes wrong. John Russell is Jordan, the vicious mastermind; June Blair (Miss January 1957) is Paula, torn between her loyalty to Jordan and her relationship with an ambulance attendant (Stuart Whitman).Many strange details: a meta semi-documentary voiceover, a scene that turns out to be a movie within the movie, Paula’s shoes, a baffling double-entendre, a blind man drinking milk in a strip club. Worth waiting for: the closing minutes on Terminal Island, with stacks of junked streetcars. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Scene of the Crime (dir. Roy Rowland, 1949). The first minutes are promising, but this movie felt interminable. Van Johnson stars as a police detective investigating the murder of a colleague. He spends much of the movie shuttling between his sour wife (Arlene Dahl) and a nightclub performer (Gloria DeHaven) whom he romances in the interest of justice. DeHaven’s song and dance and John McIntire’s stoic presence add value to an otherwise mediocre movie. ★★ (YT)

*

Nine Perfect Strangers (created by John-Henry Butterworth and David E. Kelley, 2021). Tranquillium (in the real world a mattress brand and a med to calm pets) is a place for healing, transformation, et cetera, run by Masha (Nicole Kidman), an enigmatic sage with piercing blue eyes and a hazy backstory. To this luxe retreat come a family of three, a married couple, and four people traveling solo, all, in different ways, “broken.” So we get something like a cross between Big Brother and Survivor, with tropes galore, eclectic — or is it incoherent? — dabbling in spiritual practices, and an ever stranger, ever darker atmosphere. Forget Masha: it’s the guests who make this mini-series worth watching, and Melissa McCarthy steals it as Frances Welty, a writer of romance novels. ★★★★ (H)

*

The Many Saints of Newark (dir. Alan Taylor, 2021). At yet another funeral, young Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini, bearing a remarkable resemblance to his father James), and sister Janice (Alexandra Intrator) look at the made men in the next room and wonder what they’re talking about: and there’s my problem with this prequel to The Sopranos, which is always attending to surfaces — a MAD poster, a Mister Softee truck, the Palisades Amusement Park jingle, the ghastly drink known as Seven and Seven, and heaping platters of Italian specialities whose names I had to look up. Tony’s relationships with his father Johnny (Jon Bernthal) and his mother Livia (Vera Farmiga, looking and sounding eerily like Edie Falco) are left largely unexplored. At center stage: clichéd mob man Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola) and lots of violence in a war between the mob and a Black entrepreneur (Leslie Odom Jr.) for control of the Newark numbers racket. Despite the clichés, Dickie, who for reasons none too clear is Tony’s mentor, has the movie’s most surprising moments, challenging his father “Hollywood Dick” (Ray Liotta), going to the beach with mistress Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi), and visiting uncle Sal (also Ray Liotta) in prison, where the conversation turns to Buddhism and Miles Davis’s The Birth of the Cool. ★★ (HBO Max)

*

The Innocents (dir. Jack Clayton, 1961). An adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, with a screenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote. Deborah Kerr plays Miss Giddens, the governess determined to protect her charges, Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens), from the evil that haunts their rambling, creaky house. It’s clear enough that something went on in this house between the now-dead gardener and the now-dead previous governess, and that the children heard and saw things they should not have heard and seen, and that the children are downright spooky, but as for the rest — well, you’ll have to watch. This governess and this movie scared the bejeezus out of me. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Detective Story (dir. William Wyler, 1951). A day in the life of Manhattan’s 21st Precinct, with all manner of odd characters dropping in: it’s a picture of a police station that must have influenced Barney Miller. At the center of things is James McLeod (Kirk Douglas), a detective whose rigid notions of crime and punishment will lead to a tragic reversal in his life. Surrounding his story are countless other stories and bits of business, courtesy of a remarkable cast that includes William Bendix, Lee Grant (overacting), George Macready, Horace McMahon (prepping for Naked City !) Cathy O’Donnell, Eleanor Parker, and Joseph Wiseman (also overacting). Lee Garmes’s cinematography finds every imaginable angle and character grouping in the station house, with lots of deep-focus shots. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley (dir. John McGonagle, 1965). The hall is packed for a Cambridge Union Society debate: “Has the American Dream Been Achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?” James Baldwin, with nothing more than a crumpled piece of notepaper, is a stunning speaker, recounting what “you” as a Black American experience, then speaking in the first person as the embodiment of centuries of history: “I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else’s whip, for nothing.” Buckley, with gratuitous insults and grand gestures and his usual clipboard, presents as a genteel racist. My one complaint: “the American dream” (which iA Writer flags as a cliché) is never defined. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Private Property (dir. Leslie Stevens, 1960). Long thought lost but rediscovered: the story of two drifters, Duke (Corey Allen) and Boots (Warren Oates), who spy on, charm, and menace a wealthy (and, clearly, lonely) Los Angeles housewife, Ann Carlyle (Kate Manx). Boots is Lennie to Duke’s George, with this difference: Duke is a psychopath who promises Lennie his first sexual experience with Ann. The threat of sexual violence that hangs over the film is offset by odd elements of comedy: inane conversations, non sequiturs, and grim clichés of suburban life. I wonder if this film might have been a secret influence on The Graduate. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Man on a Swing (dir. Frank Perry, 1974). From a (purportedly) true story: here’s Cliff Robertson again, as Lee Tucker, a police chief investigating the baffling murder of a young teacher. A local clairvoyant, Franklin Wills (Joel Grey), comes to his assistance and displays a remarkable knowledge of the circumstances of the murder. Grey makes the movie: polite, dandyish, or menacing; falling into a trance or suddenly appearing in the chief’s garage; an enigma as to his gift and his possible guilt. Watch for Anna Wilson (Ben’s mother in The Graduate ) as a psychiatrist and George Voskovec (Juror No. 11 in 12 Angry Men ) as a professor. ★★★★ (CC)

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