Twelve movies

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

Five Easy Pieces (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1970). Jack Nicholson plays Robert Dupea, an oil-rig worker who visits the family compound, a Chekhovian world of classical music and idleness. Robert once studied piano — thus the title — but now finds himself alienated from his family’s high-minded pursuits, alienated from his Tammy Wynette-singing girlfriend (Karen Black), alienated from everyone. I think watching movies mostly from the 1940s and ’50s makes me an unfit audience for this one. With Karen Black, Lois Smith, and Ralph Waite. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Without Warning! (dir. Arnold Laven, 1952). Adam Williams (Valerian in North by Northwest ) plays an unassuming gardener who kills blonde women with garden shears. Much better than that grim synopsis might suggest, with stylish cinematography by Joseph F. Biroc, a fresh-sounding score by Herschel Burke Gilbert, and great location shots of Chavez Ravine and the Los Angeles River. Though the outcome is never in doubt, there’s genuine suspense as the story nears its end. One great unnecessary bit: the lab analyst preparing coffee. ★★★ (YT)

*

Conflict (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1945). I was surprised to see this title — a Humphrey Bogart movie I’d never heard of. Deeply weird and disturbing, with Bogart as Richard Mason, an unhappily married man openly pining for his wife’s sister (Alexis Smith). Mason kills his wife (Rose Hobart) — or thinks he has — but signs that she’s still alive begin to appear — jewelry, a handkerchief, the scent of her perfume. With Sydney Greenstreet as a jovial bachelor psychologist. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Janes (dir. Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, 2022). In the pre-Roe world, a small group of Chicago women established “Call Jane,” a service providing safe and affordable (or free) abortions. And the service flourished for years. I learned a lot — especially about how organized crime profited from illegal abortions. I wish that this film weren’t so timely. ★★★★ (HBO)

*

The Gospel of Eureka (dir. Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri, 2018). Eureka Springs, Arkansas is home to an enormous Christ of the Ozarks statue, a summertime Passion Play (both the work of the Christian nationalist and anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith, whose views are no longer reflected in the play), and a flourishing LGBTQ community. We see both the play’s cast and drag performers making up and getting in costume, and the filmmakers seem to be trying to convince the viewer that these endeavors are not so different, and that everyone in Eureka Springs just gets along. But basic questions — population size, whether the drag performers live locally and are known to their neighbors, whether they always lip-sync to religious tunes, what Passion Play audiences might say about the LGBQT community, how that community established itself in Eureka Springs, whether anyone ever gets harassed — never get answers. This CNN story does a better job than the documentary. ★★ (CC)

*

21 Days (dir. Basil Dean, 1940). The premise is established with Hitchcockian economy and speed: Larry Durrant (Laurence Olivier), the ne’er-do-well brother of a judge (Leslie Banks, the father in The Man Who Knew Too Much), returns to London and begins a romance with the beautiful Wanda Wallen (Vivien Leigh, who would soon marry Olivier). When a man who claims to be Wanda’s husband shows up, there’s a struggle, the man ends up dead, and Larry is faced with the choice of turning himself in or letting an indigent suspect hang for murder. Larry has twenty-one days in which to decide. “Murder is promises.” ★★★★ (CC)

*

Death in Small Doses (dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1957). The doses: amphetamine, known to truckers (at least in 1957) as bennies, co-pilots, and stay-awakes. Peter Graves plays a federal agent who goes undercover as a novice driver to find the source of distribution in Los Angeles. Romance is in the air at his boarding house (with landlady Mala Powers). Mostly predictable, but the ending took naive me by surprise. Merry Anders has a good turn as a waitress, and Chuck Connors steals the movie as a pill-popping truckdriver. ★★★ (YT)

*

Joy in the Morning (dir. Alex Segal, 1965). From the novel by Betty Smith. Richard Chamberlain and Yvette Mimieux play a young married couple, Carl and Annie, struggling with multiple challenges: jealousy, fear of intimacy, parental disapproval, and the burdens of study and side jobs (Carl is in law school). There’s little chemistry between the principals, and too many exclamations: “Oh, Carl! Carl!” The most compelling character in the movie is Anthony (Donald Davis), a gay florist who befriends Annie and gives her crucial advice about life and love: his story would make a good movie. ★★ (TCM)

*

Abandoned (dir. Joe Newman, 1949). A glib but ultimately earnest reporter, Mark (Dennis O’Keefe), teams up with Paula (Gale Storm), who’s come to Los Angeles to search for her missing sister. Risking great danger, Mark and Paula uncover a baby-selling racket. At times a procedural, with the chief of police (Jeff Chandler) assisting the searchers; at times a noir, with shadowy corners (courtesy of cinematographer William Daniels) and implications of sadistic brutality. Look for Raymond Burr as a sketchy detective. ★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Noir in Color collection

Desert Fury (dir. Lewis Allen, 1947). A love pentagon, I’d call it, with Mary Astor, Wendell Corey, John Hodiak, Burt Lancaster, and Lizabeth Scott all furious and desiring in the desert. Criterion notes the gay subtext that joins criminal partners Eddie (Hodiak) and Johnny (Corey), but it’s a text, really, written in all caps. Johnny’s account of how he and Eddie got together is an extraordinary thing to appear in 1947: they met in an Automat at two in the morning, and, Johnny says, “I went home with him that night.” The movie though is inert until its last twenty minutes or so, and then the pentagon begins to wobble and spin. ★★

Inferno (dir. Roy Ward Baker, 1953). There is no backstory: we begin with a dissolute millionaire, Donald Whitley Carson III (Robert Ryan), one leg broken, left by his wife Geraldine (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover Joseph Duncan (William Lundigan) to die in the desert. Determined to survive and exact revenge, Carson becomes self-reliant, splinting his leg, fashioning ropes with which to navigate rock formations, discovering a spring, fashioning a crutch, and avoiding discovery by the treacherous couple, who now need to make sure that he’s dead. Every minute of this movie is intensely watchable, and the outcome is never certain. My favorite moment: money in a cabin. ★★★★

[Inferno was a 3-D movie with stereo sound; thus the objects thrown at or falling toward the viewer and the slightly blurred dialogue.]

I Died a Thousand Times (dir. Stuart Heisler, 1955). It’s a scene-by-scene remake of High Sierra (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1941), with Jack Palance and Shelley Winters taking the roles of Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) and Marie Garson (Ida Lupino), and it doesn’t come close to the original. Palance and Winters are fine actors, but the Roy–Marie relationship here lacks the desperation and pathos of the original. (I for one can’t watch Lupino’s final minutes in the original without some added tears.) And there’s too much mambo music: mambo, mambo, mambo. ★★

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All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)