Twelve movies

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

That Brennan Girl (dir. Alfred Santell, 1946). You’re fourteen and you buy a gardenia for your mother (June Duprez) on Mother’s Day, only to find her in the company of some man, and she pretends that you’re her sister, not her daughter: no wonder the Brennan girl, Ziggy (Mona Freeman), goes astray. With her mother’s encouragement and the tutelage of Denny Reagan (James Dunn), Ziggy gets involved in all kinds of illegal schemes. Suffice it to say that her life goes very wrong before an improbable redemption. Mona Freeman is excellent playing a walking contradiction — hard as nails yet still vulnerable. ★★★ (YT)

*

Slightly Scarlet (dir. Allan Dwan, 1956). From Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, a James M. Cain novel I’ve never read. The movie feels like melodrama crossed with a crime story: in Bay City, two sisters, one “good” (Rhonda Fleming), one “bad” (Arlene Dahl), compete for the affections of a crooked cop (John Payne) while the “good” sister is also involved with the city’s mayor (Kent Taylor). Meanwhile, the king of the rackets (Ted de Corsia) is on his way back from Mexico to find the cop, who crossed him up. The best thing about the movie: Arlene Dahl’s campy over-the-top performance, which make me think of Harriet Sansom Harris’s Bebe Glazer in Frasier. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Million Dollar Legs (dir. Edward F. Cline, 1932). Pre-Code, but It’s not what you think: those legs belong to the Major-Domo (Andy Clyde, Cully Wilson of television’s Lassie), one of the countless athletes competing in the 1932 Olympics to raise money for going-bankrupt Klopstokia. Endless gags, verbal and visual, a spoof romance, and a chance to see how what a dextrous performer W.C. Fields was (I always think of him, wrongly, as drunk and bumbling). Susan Fleming, Jack Oakie, Lyda Roberti, and Ben Turpin are among the other performers in a movie that seems far ahead of its time. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Tampopo (dir. Juzo Itami, 1985). A ramen-obsessed truckdriver, Gorō (Tsutomu Yamazaki), helps a widow lady, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), turn her dilapidated little ramen shop into a place for the perfect bowl of noodle soup. Why did I write “widow lady”? Because Gorō is something of a Lone Ranger, in a film its witer-director called a “ramen western.” Gorō is helped by Tonto his trucking partner, an interior decorator, a chauffeur with a flair for noodles, and an elderly reed-thin master of ramen. Various unrelated side-stories weave through this funny, tender celebration of food and (sometimes) sex. ★★★★ (CC)

[Tsutomu Yamazaki, Ken Watanabe, Yoshi Katō, Kinzō Sakura, and Rikiya Yasuoka.]

[Tampopo and Jiro Dreams of Sushi (dir. David Gelb, 2011) would make a great double bill: two searches for perfection in food.]

*

Babette’s Feast (dir. Gabriel Axel, 1987). In the late 19th century, in remote, rugged Jutland, two elderly sisters, Martine (Birgitte Federspiel) and Philippa (Bodil Kjer), keep house with the help of Babette Hersant (Stéphane Audran), a French refugee who cooks for them. The sisters are the daughters of a charismatic (dead) pastor-prophet whose small band of elderly followers still keep to their severe, pleasure-denying life — at least until Babette prepares a glorious French dinner for them. An extraordinarily beautiful fable of generosity, humanity, body, soul, luck, and art. Babette recalls the words of a French singer: “He’d say, ‘Through all the world there goes one long cry of from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.” ★★★★ (CC)

*

Ladies in Retirement (dir. Charles Vidor, 1941). I like seeing the seeds of film noir repotted in unusual soil (Station West, say, or The Suspect). Here, as in The Suspect, it’s gothic noir, with a housekeeper (Ida Lupino), her potted sisters (Edith Barrett, Elsa Lanchester), her louche nephew (Louis Hayward), her wealthy employer (Isobel Elsom), and a siren-like maid (Evelyn Keyes). Events are both predictable and non-, Hitchcock-like, with moments of genuine suspense and creepiness. Fascinating to see Ida Lupino become more recognizably Ida Lupino as the story unfolds and her desperation deepens. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Blackmail (dir. Lesley Selander, 1947). Another one from Republic Pictures, a poor man’s version of The Big Sleep, with compromising photographs, a disappearing corpse, even a hothouse. You know a movie is in trouble when the fight scenes (which go on and on) and the snappy patter are occasions for incredulous laughter. Lavish sets, which may have left little money for writers and actors. “You couldn’t stand having the lid pried off that box, could you, Pandora?” ★★ (YT)

*

The Phantom of the Monastery (dir. Fernando de Fuentes, 1934). Lost in a dark wood, three hikers, a married couple and a best friend/aspiring cuckolder, seek shelter for the night at a monastery. The hikers’ conversation makes clear — repeatedly, repeatedly — that the monastery is somehow outside of space and time. It does harbor all sorts of strange phenomena: labyrinthine hallways, a room full of coffins, an inexplicable shadow, moans from a sealed cell. Good and weird, with a closing moral, this movie anticipates The Twilight Zone by several decades. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Murder Is My Beat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1955). The lure here was the director, celebrated for Detour. This film too is low-budget, but it’s plain ordinary and hilariously improbable, with disbelief suspended and left pleading, “Hey, get me down from here!” A police detective (Paul Langton) investigates a grotesque murder (the victim facedown in a fireplace) and becomes convinced that the convicted killer (Barbara Payton) is innocent. So he and she jump from the train that’s taking her to prison and set out to find the real killer, which, no surprise, they do. ★★ (YT)

*

The Artist (2011, dir. Michel Hazanavicius). Ah, yes, I thought: it’s “the movies,” to borrow Umberto Eco’s characterization of Casablanca. And it turns out that that’s what I thought when I first saw The Artist in 2012. Tropes galore, and actors and cinematography that look exactly right (contrast every recent Hollywood movie with men in fedoras). One of the best bits: Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) and George Valentin’s (Jean Dujardin) jacket. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Dragonwyck (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946). Overtones of Jane Eyre, with an unworldly young woman (Gene Tierney) coming to work as a companion to a child in a great house full of secrets. An imperious landowner (Vincent Price) is its master and mini-god. There’s a sickly wife (Vivienne Osborne), a kindly handsome doctor (Glenn Langan), and a mysterious upper room. I can’t forget to mention the harpsichord music that some residents of the house hear in the middle of the night. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Crooked Web (dir. Nathan Juran, 1955). Probable impossibilities are better than improbable possibilities, right? But I’m still not sure that Aristotle would find much to like in this movie, in which a hamburger-stand everyman Stan (Frank Lovejoy) is sucked into a scheme to recover a stash of hidden loot in Germany. Double-crosses and plot twists and quick saves abound, and Stan turns out to be something more or less than an everyman. Aristotle might like Stan’s Diner, which, like Aristotle himself, is long gone. ★★ (YT)

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)