Ten movies, two seasons

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

The Devil Doll (dir. Tod Browning, 1936). An extraordinarily well-made movie from the director of Dracula and Freaks. The premise is simple and bizarre: Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore), a banker wrongfully convicted of murder and robbery, escapes from prison along with a scientist who created a process to shrink human beings (and thus reduce the dangers of overpopulation). When the scientist dies, his widow (Rafaela Ottiano) and Lavond join forces, creating miniature humans to kill the men who framed Lavond. The special effects are spectacularly good, as is Barrymore’s work in his disguise as Madame Mandilip. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Corpse Vanishes (dir. Wallace Fox, 1942). A plucky society columnist (Luana Walters) gets to the bottom of the evil machinations of Dr. Lorenz (Bela Lugosi), who knocks out brides and uses their precious bodily fluids to keep his wife from aging. What makes the movie worth watching: Dr. Lorenz’s male assistants, Frank Moran of the Preston Sturges world and Angelo Rossitto of Freaks. Also adding value: an unintentionally hilarious scene of theft. So bad, so good, and fit for SCTV’s Monster Chiller Horror Theatre. ★★ (TCM)

*

Underground (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1941). Even if they say so themselves, Warner Bros. did lead the American movie industry’s opposition to Nazism and fascism. Underground is a Warner Bros. B-movie (no big stars) about German anti-Nazi radio broadcasts, sibling conflict, and the state’s brutalization of its citizens. It’s suspenseful and unflinching, always. This movie makes me wonder how many genuinely great movies from the 1940s are still unknown to me. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Being Mary Tyler Moore (dir. James Adolphus, 2023). A documentary that draws upon interviews, home videos, television and film clips, and recollections of friends and collaborators. If you know Mary Tyler Moore mainly as Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, you’ll be surprised (as I was) by how much work preceded and followed each of those roles. The home videos are especially revealing: in one, Moore, at home with friends and inebriated, topples onto a floor; in others, she seems determined to show how happy she was in her final marriage. In 2023, the debate about whether Moore was an enemy of feminism (represented here by Gloria Steinem) seems mistakenly sad: that she calls her boss “Mr. Grant” seems to me a marker of Minnesota nice, not subservience. ★★★★ (M)

*

In Which We Serve (dir. Noël Coward and David Lean, 1942). I’ve had this film on a to-watch list for years, and there it was, on Memorial Day: the story of the HMS Torrin, a WWII British Navy destroyer, its captain (Coward, and he’s convincing), and a handful of crew members, whose stories are told in flashbacks (sans voiceover narration) as the men drift in a life raft after the Torrin is hit by German bombers. The juxtapositions of past and present, peace and war, land and sea, are poignant and harrowing: there’s no looking away from the agony of battle here. And throughout we see men and women meeting the most difficult circumstances with an understated stoic courage. With Joyce Carey, Celia Johnson, Bernard Miles, John Mills, Kay Walsh, and many more. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Succession, fourth season (created by Jesse Armstrong, 2023). Lukas Mattson on the Roys: “”It’s basically just, like, money and gossip.” And Roman Roy: “We’re bullshit.” I agree, and I’m happy to be done with the arch looks, flip zingers, sibling rivalries, and the New York Times articles about the clothing in each episode. But I’ll grant that the election-night episode “America Decides” was enough to elicit something approaching post-traumatic stress. ★★ (M)

*

Somebody Somewhere, second season (created by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, 2023). The season focuses on the joys and sorrows of friendship: as Fred (Murray Hill) plans his marriage and Joel (Jeff HIller) finds himself in a new relationship, Sam (Bridget Everett) begins to feel awkwardly alone. Happiest moment: “Gloria”; saddest: “Take your windbreaker and go”; most ineffable: the mention of love during the singing lesson. This show, so full of humanity, and so deserving of a much larger audience, has been renewed for a third season. Now there just needs to be fair compensation for those who will write it. ★★★★ (M)

*

L’Innocent (dir. Louis Garrel, 2022). A thriller with comic overtones and some wonderful blurring of the real and the fictive. Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg), an acting teacher working with prison inmates, marries one of her students, Michel (Roschdy Zem), and upon his release, they set up a flower shop together. Sylvie’s son Abel (Garrel) doesn’t trust Michel and begins to shadow him with the help of his friend Clémence (Noémie Merlant). Complications ensue, and Abel and Clémence are drawn into a criminal scheme that requires them to do a bit of acting themselves. The spirit of Pedro Almodóvar seems to preside over the action, with strong touches of Diva, Next Stop Wonderland, and Vertigo. ★★★★ (CC)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Masc feature

No Ordinary Man (dir. Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt, 2020). The life of Billy Tipton (1914–1989), jazz musician, transman, husband, father. I remember when Billy Tipton’s story first made the news, as a matter of a musician who went undercover, so to speak, in order to make a living in music. The truth was another matter, as this documentary makes clear. In it transmen and -women speak, eloquently, about identity and categorization, but I wish there more about Billy Tipton’s life and music, and less of interviewees playing him in scripted scenes. ★★★ (CC)

*

Three from the Criterion Channel’s Method Acting feature

The Naked Spur (dir. Anthony Mann, 1953). It’s 1868, and Jimmy Stewart is Howard Kemp, a bounty hunter in the Rocky Mountains. With the help of a prospector (Millard Mitchell) and an ex-cavalryman and rapist (Ralph Meeker, who looks and talks as if he stepped out of, say, Easy Rider ), Kemp finds Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), who killed a marshal back in Kansas, and Ben’s traveling companion (Janet Leigh), the daughter of Ben’s dead bank-robber friend. Strong overtones of the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Vandergroat: “The longer we ride, the more things that can happen.” ★★★★ (CC)

The Goddess (dir. John Cromwell, 1958). Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay is loosely based on — or is it cruelly appropriative of? — the life of Marilyn Monroe. Kim Stanley, who did most of her work on the stage, is the goddess, beginning her life as Emily Ann Faulkner, the child of a mother who gives her away to relatives; two dysfunctional marriages later, Emily becomes the Hollywood star Rita Shawn, drinking, taking pills, and hopelessly dependent on a Nurse Ratched-like assistant who calls Rita “Baby.” The acting is fine (John Power and Lloyd Bridges as Emily’s wildly different husbands are especially good), but the script is overwrought. I’m surprised to see that I know Kim Stanley’s work in film in two ways: she starred in Séance on a Wet Afternoon and was the voice of the adult Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. ★★★

Rachel, Rachel (dir. Paul Newman, 1968). Joanne Woodward is Rachel Cameron, a thirty-something second-grade teacher, painfully self-conscious and socially averse, living with her mother (is that her voice calling in the title?) above the funeral home that the late Mr. Cameron once owned. Into Rachel’s life comes Nick Kazlik (James Olson), a high-school classmate, now a high-school teacher in New York City, visiting his folks for the summer and looking for “some action.” What follows is a complicated meeting of innocence and experience, with all the awkwardness and misunderstanding and exhilaration that such a meeting might yield. And to think that Joanne Woodward didn’t receive the Academy Award for this performance. ★★★★ (CC)

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