[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, PBS, TCM, YouTube.]
Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder, 1944). I like the way Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) fingers his bloody pack of cigarettes as he dictates his confession to Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). I like the utter bizarreness of Barabra Stanwyck’s wig. I like the match-lighting reversal that ends the movie. I could watch this movie again and again — oh, I already have. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Roses Are Red (dir. James Tinling, 1947). You’ve seen the recent New York Times article about doppelgängers and DNA? Well, the new DA (Don Castle) is a dead ringer for a recently paroled crime boss (Don Castle), so the crime boss kidnaps the DA, learns his mannerisms and habits, and take his place. The weird thing is that the two men’s romantic partners (Peggy Knudsen, Patricia Knight) also resemble one another. Preposterous but pleasant. ★★★ (YT)
*
Directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz
Veslemøy’s Song (2018). A beautifully made short film in which a search for the past brings back a fragment. Audrey Benac (Deragh Campbell) discovers a familial connection to Kathleen Parlow (1890–1963), a celebrated Canadian violinist, and makes a trip to the New York Public Library in search of Parlow’s recording of “Veslemøy’s Song.” The filmmaker blurs the line between documentarian and storyteller. The credits help to clear things up. ★★★★ (CC)
Never Eat Alone (2016). Aha: it turns out that Veslemøy’s Song is a brief epilogue to this film, and that Audrey Benac (Deragh Campbell) is a recurring figure in Bohdanowicz’s films, a stand-in for the director. Here Audrey visits and speaks with her grandmother Joan Benac (Joan Benac, the director’s grandmother), with memories and CBC footage of a 1950s(?) musical-theater production in which Joan appeared with her one-time boyfriend Don Radovich (played by George Radovics, the director’s partner’s grandfather). Is it possible to locate Don and recover that past? It all sounds like a rehearsal for “Finding Frances” (Nathan for You, 2017), but this dark, quiet film ends up going nowhere, not even to a listening room in the New York Public Library. ★★★ (CC)
*
Dead of Night (dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer, 1945). An anthology movie: in an English country house, a group of friends and an odd interloper tell spooky tales. “Christmas Party,” with its Turn of the Screw overtones, and “The Haunted Mirror” are for me the best of the lot. Fun to see Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne (from The Lady Vanishes) in “Golfing Story,” but that story feels interminable, as does “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy.” The frame story ends up being a disappointment, but I don’t think any other frame could fit. ★★★ (TCM)
*
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Based on the life story of Robert Elliott Burns, with Paul Muni as an unemployed Great War vet and aspiring engineer sentenced to ten years of hard labor after being tricked into abetting a robbery. Pre-Code Warner Bros. moviemaking with an emphasis on social justice, exposing the utter brutality of chain-gang life. Ninety years later, it’s still strong stuff. With Edward Ellis, Glenda Farrell, Noel Francis, Allen Jenkins, and forward-looking cinematography by Sol Polito. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Missing Women (dir. Philip Ford, 1951). Hmm — a Republic Picture that we’ve never heard of, so it could be a hidden gem, or at least a hidden shard of colorful glass. But it wasn’t even mediocre. Even the title is off: there’s a missing woman, singular (Penny Edwards), who’s missing because she’s dyed her hair and gone underground to find the car thieves who killed her husband. Look for Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson from Adventures of Superman) as the thief-in-chief. ★ (YT)
*
The Crowd (dir. King Vidor, 1928). I have no great acquaintance with silent movies, but I think there can be little debate that The Crowd is one of the greatest. It’s the story of the Sims, John (James Murray) and Mary (Eleanor Boardman, then married to the director), their courtship and marriage, with moments of joy, moments of great difficulty, and an inconceivable tragedy. This movie does not flinch. Murray (who came to a bad end) has a Dick Powell cheerfulness; Boardman’s performance and Henry Sharp’s cinematography take us into modern times. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
I Love a Mystery (dir. Henry Levin, 1945). Me too, but not this one. In the words of one character, “The whole thing sounds so preposterous.” From the radio serial of the same name, with Jim Bannon and Barton Yarborough as detectives Jack Packard and Doc Long, and Nina Foch and George Macready as a married couple with money and secrets. A Tibetan secret society, a near-death by flaming dessert, a murderous stalker with a peg leg, and a mummy in need of a look-alike replacement head are just four of the elements in the story. ★★ (TCM)
*
The Cobweb (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1955). CinemaScope soap opera, on a grand scale. The setting is a psychiatric hospital, run by Dr. Stewart McIver (Richard Widmark), who ignores his wife Karen (Gloria Grahame) (the implication is that, in the language of the time, she’s “frigid”) but shows interest in a staff member (Lauren Bacall). A dispute over the choice for new drapes in the hospital library precipitates crises on multiple fronts. The cast includes Charles Boyer, Lillian Gish, Oscar Levant (as, no surprise, a patient), and Fay Wray. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Lost Horizon (dir. Frank Capra, 1937). A plane crash in the Himalayas leaves a motley group of white folks — a diplomat (Ronald Colman), a con man (Thomas Mitchell), a paleontologist (Edward Everett Horton), and others — in the mysterious realm of Shangri-La, a world unto itself, removed (sort of) from time, sunny and warm, devoted to peaceful leisure — and run by a white man, with Asian men and women doing all the necessary work. It’s like an all-inclusive island vacation with a heavy dash of mysticism. And I have to admit — it’s also an extraordinarily beautiful film. With Sam Jaffe, H.B. Warner, Jane Wyatt (that’s a double in the from-a-great-distance nude scene), and not one Asian actor receiving a screen credit or speaking in a more than perfunctory way. ★★★★ (CC)
*
The U.S. and the Holocaust (dir. Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, 2022). Work on this PBS documentary series began in 2015. The makers must have experienced an especially uncanny dread as our world came more and more to resemble the world of the film. Racism, xenophobia, “America First,” dreams of a wall, conspiracy-mongering about “globalists,” genocidal violence — here we were, and are once again. And eighty and more years ago, the good works of small numbers of Americans were everywhere overshadowed by indifference or hostility to an immigrant other: as the historian Deborah Lipstadt says on camera, “No one wanted these people.” ★★★★ (PBS)
Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)
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