Eleven movies, one partial series

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

Tall Story (dir. Joshua Logan, 1960). Jane Fonda’s movie debut: she plays June Ryder, a home ec major who’s transferred to a four-year school from a community college, set on landing Ray Blent (Anthony Perkins), a star basketball player whom she’s never met, as a husband (finding a husband, she tells us, is the reason young women go to college). It’s amusing to see the depiction of academic life (no reading, no writing, for faculty or students), less amusing to soak in coy sexual politics for an hour and a half. From a novel by Howard Nemerov, with a screenplay by Julius J. Epstein (as in Casablanca). Bonus factors: Marc Connelly and Ray Walston as professors, and Fonda and Perkins crammed (fully clothed) into a tiny shower stall, not long before Psycho. ★★ (TCM)

*

Twentieth Century (dir. Howard Hawks, 1934). John Barrymore is great as a manic Broadway director; Carole Lombard (I’m sorry to say) shows less of a gift for comedy. The rehearsal scenes are hilarious, with chalk lines criss-crossing the stage. The train scenes are less wonderful, with interminable comic antics from supporting players. It may be that our household is just not a fan of screwball comedies — too broad, too forced, and too much shouting. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Track the Man Down (dir. R.G. Springsteen, 1955). Mediocre imitation Hitchcock, a variation on The Lady Vanishes, with an American newspaper man in London (Kent Taylor) and the sister (Petula Clark) of a criminal’s girlfriend thrown together with an assortment of characters — a merry drunk, a mother and infant, a Bette Davis-like star, her meek husband. First they’re all on a bus; then they’re all in a boathouse, held as prisoners by the criminal, who’ll stop at nothing — nothing. I’m adding a star for Basil Emmett’s cinematography. ★★★ (YT)

*

Succession (created by Jesse Armstrong, 2018–2021). We binged the first three seasons and have watched what’s available of season four, with (ahem) diminishing returns. The Lear-like and Murdoch-like premise, for anyone who hasn’t watched: a media-empire patriarch, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), is contemplating the future of his company when he finally steps down. His four children battle him, one another, outside attempts at takeovers, and the gummint, on and on and on. It’s well-made television, with staggeringly beautiful locations, and endless helicopters, endless profanity, endless improbably spontaneous insults, and characters who are both loathsome and inane, and whose pasts (which the opening credits hint at, and which might make them appear more than merely loathsome and inane) are, as of last night’s episode, still largely unexplored. ★★★ (HBO)

[I’m thinking especially of two enigmatic images in the opening credits: one, of a woman, shot from behind, looking across a lawn at Logan; the other, of young Siobhan looking across a lawn at Logan and a woman. Who?]

*

Your Witness (dir. Robert Montgomery, 1950). A New York lawyer, Adam Hayward (Montgomery, in his final film), travels to an English village to help the war buddy who saved his life, and who’s now accused of murdering the village Casanova. The movie looks back to Hitchcock, with an everyman sleuth, eccentric minor characters, and wonderful moments of comedy (Hayward explaining American idioms to the locals). And it looks ahead to every Murder, She Wrote episode ever made. Most unusual moment: Montgomery reads a D.H. Lawrence poem aloud and saves his friend’s life. ★★★ (YT)

*

Grissly’s Millions (dir. John English, 1945). It’s hard to go wrong with a B-movie from Republic Pictures, especially one that stars Paul Kelly and Virginia Grey. Here Kelly plays a detective, stern but kind, on the trail of a gangster; Grey is a granddaughter whose grandfather’s money keeps her stuck in a hick town. A pair of corpses leads to great complications. Clem Bevans, Byron Foulger, Eily Malyon, Louis Mason, Addison Richards, and Will Wright are among the likely unfamiliar names but likely familiar faces who provide support. ★★★ (YT)

*

If I Had a Million (dir. James Cruze, H. Bruce Humberstone, Ernst Lubitsch, Norman Z. McLeod, Lothar Mendes, Stephen Roberts, William A. Seiter, Norman Taurog, 1932). An anthology, with eight stories of an eccentric dying industrialist (Lionel Barrymore) giving million-dollar checks to people chosen at random from a city directory. The weakest story is the one with the most recognizable faces, Seiter’s “The Three Marines,” with Gary Cooper, Roscoe Karns, and Jack Oakie. The most succinct: Lubitsch’s “The Clerk,” with Charles Laughton walking through door after door to give the boss the raspberry. The strongest: McLeod’s “Road Hogs,” with W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth as a happy couple bent on automotive destruction, and “Grandma,” in which the residents of a “rest home” establish a new order of things. ★★★★ (CC)

[In 2023, one million equals twenty-two.]

*

EO (dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022). I knew only that it’s about a donkey and that the Criterion Channel has it in its selection of Isabelle Huppert movies (though her role, like all the human roles, is exceedingly minor). The movie shows (not tells) the story of a donkey, EO, who is removed from a circus (where a young woman gives him loving care) and who then travels through a series of encounters other animals, some of them human. Unnecessary special effects — red filters, thrashing metal music — are distractions, but they don’t in the end distract from the movie’s presentation of the beauty, strength, and selfhood of EO and other creatures. Inspired by Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), which is still, to my mind, the better movie. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Man Bait (dir. Terence Fisher, 1952). Blackmail and murder in a London rare-book store? I’m in. As store manager, George Brent gets himself into hard-to-explain circumstances and finds himself in great difficulty. But the real star is Diana Dors as one of his employees, chronically late, a bad girl among the bookish. With Marguerite Chapman as a loyal secretary and Peter Reynolds as a criminal and ladies’ man. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Strangers When We Meet (dir. Richard Quine, 1960). Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak are partners in suburban SoCal adultery: he’s Larry, an architect, full of himself, always pressing his standoffish neighbor Maggie (Margaret, but he insists on calling her Maggie) to drive with him to a construction site — and soon they’re driving elsewhere too. Larry’s wife (Barbara Rush) is critical, controlling, and unattuned to her husband’s dreams of great things; Maggie’s husband (John Bryant) is a sex-averse workaholic: thus the movie presents the affair as an understandable interlude, a more-than-brief encounter. A question our household is split on: would contemporary audiences have seen Larry as toxic, or as just plain manly? With Ernie Kovac as a full-of-himself writer and Walter Matthau as a sleazy but truthful neighbor. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Man with My Face (dir. Edward Montagne, 1951). The only film noir filmed in Puerto Rico. It’s the story of Chick Graham, a mild-mannered accountant (Barry Nelson) who finds himself accused of impersonating a man (also Barry Nelson) who is his double. An elaborate, preposterous scheme, four years in the making, accounts for what’s going on. The redeeming qualities here: a killer Doberman and an exciting chase sequence at Fort Morro Castle. ★★ (YT)

*

Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History (dir. Stephen Ives, 2023). I hate Monopoly — the dumb tokens, the convoluted procedures and tedious pace (bidding on every property a player doesn’t buy? really?) — and I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a game that was played through to a genuine conclusion. This well-paced documentary explores the game’s origins, which have nothing to do with the claims of its purported inventor. Irony of ironies: the real origin story became clear when Parker Brothers sued a professor of economics who created a game called Anti-Monopoly. Stephen Ives has made a noble effort to tell a factual story of Davids and a Goliath. ★★★★ (PBS)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)