Eleven movies, one series

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

Flaxy Martin (dir. Richard L. Bare, 1949). A lawyer, Walter Colby (Zachary Scott), serves a crime boss and falls for his girlfriend Flaxy (Virginia Mayo), with many complications ensuing. Flaxy is missing for much of the movie, literally out of the picture, as Walter spends time in the company of, and for a while handcuffed to, plucky librarian Nora Carson (Dorothy Malone). As in The Best Years of Our Lives and White Heat, Mayo is a long way from light comedy, and she does very well. Watch for Elisha Cook Jr. as a cliché-spouting gunman and Tom D’Andrea (the goldfish-soliloquy cabbie in Dark Passage) as a mechanic who appears to live in his garage. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Black Glove, aka Face the Music (dir. Terence Fisher, 1954). Alex Nichol plays an American jazz trumpeter touring England. When a singer he’s just met (Ann Haslip) is murdered, he finds himself the prime suspect. Musically, things are off here: our hero steps into someone else’s rehearsal, begins blowing, uninvited, at top volume, and everyone’s cool with that. And the police appear to be cool with leaving him to solve the crime himself. ★★ (YT)

*

The Big Caper (dir. Robert Stevens, 1957). If you’re a crime boss (James Gregory) looking to pull off a payroll heist, what do you do? Why, of course: have an underling (Rory Calhoun) and your own girl (Mary Costa) pose as a married couple buying a gas station in the town where the heist is to take place. What results is a surprisingly good movie with Asphalt Jungle overtones (and Florenz Ames as a Sam Jaffe-like safecracker). Best scenes: the “couple” at home and at a barbecue, talking with neighbors and pretending to be ordinary suburbanites. ★★★ (YT)

*

Bullets for O’Hara (dir. William K. Howard, 1941). We watched thinking that this movie might have been Anthony Quinn’s first, but he had already appeared in thirty of ’em (he’s up to third billing here). Completely forgettable, aside from the ridiculous premise: a newly married man robs his wife’s wealthy friends before revealing to her that he’s a gangster. A police detective then hatches a plot. Quinn has something of a Mike Mazurki vibe here — there’s no sign of what would come later in his career. ★★ (TCM)

*

Godland (dir. Hlynur Pálmason, 2022). A new movie, streaming at Criterion, so I know I’m supposed to like it, and I did, to a point. This story of a young (presumably Lutheran) priest traveling from Denmark to and across Iceland to serve a village is visually compelling: Maria von Hausswolff’s cinematography held my attention at every moment of the movie’s 142 minutes. The themes in play are hard to miss: faith and doubt, impermanence, selfhood and community, a beautiful and unforgiving natural world, the languages of colonizer and colonized (it’s the nineteenth century, and Iceland was under Danish rule). But characterization and plot are thin, and when I learned that the title Godland is a distortion of the movie’s Danish and Icelandic titles, and that the photographs described in the preamble are a fiction, I felt at least slightly cheated. ★★★ (CC)

[Vanskabte land (Danish): Disfigured land. Volaða land: Volcanic land? Volatile land? Miserable land?]

*

Paris Underground, aka Madame Pimpernel (dir. Gregory Ratoff, 1945). Just a few minutes in, and this movie was acing the Bechdel test. It’s Paris, 1940, and two friends have fled Paris: Constance Bennett is an indolent American, Kitty de Mornay; Gracie Fields is her stout-hearted English friend Emmeline Quayle. Their plans change with the discovery of a downed British pilot. Based on Etta Shiber’s memoir Paris Underground, with strong touches of Hitchcockian comedy. ★★★★ (YT)

*

A four-part series

Merpeople (dir. Cynthia Wade, 2023). In a memoir of life with agoraphobia, Allen Shawn writes that the world needs all kinds of people: athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, and worriers, people ”who can design air conditioners” and people ”who can inspire joy.” So I suppose it must need people who want to perform as professional mermaids and mermen — the audiences on view in this documentary series certainly appear to be happy. As do the performers, all of whom have chosen a life of burning eyes, meager pay, ungainly fish bodies (pulled into place with the help of personal lubricant), and the constant danger of hypothermia (the mantra “No dead mermaids” runs through the series). The Blixunami, the Mertailor, and Sparkles are three of the more compelling personalities here. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s British Noir feature

It Always Rains on Sunday (dir. Robert Hamer, 1947). An extraordinary piece of filmmaking about family life and its discontents in London’s East End: Rose Sandigate, a former barmaid, now a wife and stepmother (Googie Withers), two resentful stepdaughters, one son, and a kind but obtuse husband (Edward Chapman) who seems more interested in darts than in his wife. Other families and complications abound in this world of crime, poverty, and seduction. Into the uneasy Sandigate situation comes a man from the past, an escaped convict (John McCallum) whom Rose once loved — it’s a bit like a lower-class Brief Encounter, compressed to a single day but moving to a very different end. Don’t miss the closing credits: they tell an interesting story. ★★★★

Pool of London (dir. Basil Dearden, 1951). Merchant seamen, one American, one Jamaican (Bonar Colleano, Earl Cameron) on a weekend’s shore leave in London. Minor and major crime, an interracial almost-relationship (Cameron and Susan Shaw), and a gripping chase to end the story. But until that chase, the movie meanders. Filmed on location, and looking as if it took inspiration from It Always Rains and Naked City. ★★★

Yield to the Night (dir. J. Lee Thompson, 1956). A movie with a title from Homer (Iliad 7, when a herald urges Ajax and Hector to cease their single combat), a recitation of “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,” and Diana Dors as a murderer awaiting execution: I’m there. Having seen Man Bait and The Long Haul, I knew that Dors was a highly capable actor, and this movie must be her finest moment, as we watch her character change from platinum-haired glamour girl (scenes in flashback) to a glassy-eyed, pallid woman in a prison jumpsuit. The prison scenes are noteworthy for the small kindnesses offered by both the convict and her keepers. The opening credits make a point worth thinking about, with second billing going not to Michael Craig, who plays Dors’s lover, but to Yvonne Mitchell, who plays a prison matron: there’s a clear, albeit one-sided, lesbian subtext here. ★★★★

Hell Drivers (dir. Cy Endfield, 1957). An ex-con (Stanley Baker) takes a job at a trucking firm transporting loads of gravel, with the drivers expected to move at terrifying speed to make their daily quota. The film focuses on corrupt business practices, friendship, romantic love, and male rivalry, with extended and, finally, boring displays of toxic masculinity on the road and in a roadside restaurant — it’s like a cross between On the Waterfront and Rebel Without a Cause. It doesn’t help that the scenes of breakneck driving are so obviously speeded up. With Peggy Cummin, Herbert Lom, Patrick McGoohan, and a young Sean Connery. ★★

[The other films in this feature: All Night Long, Green for Danger, Night and the City, Obsession, Odd Man Out, The Small Back Room, Time Without Pity, The Woman in Question. Our household has already seen them, and they’re all worth seeing.]

*

Showgirls (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1995). It’s the story of an aspiring dancer (Elizabeth Berkley) who professes no formal training, aspires to a career in Las Vegas, and spends much of her screentime naked or barely clothed. Rivalries, friendships, threats, and leering looks from all directions make up the thin, predictable plot, supplemented by copious use of the word “darlin’” and dance sequences that look like debased versions of Metropolis and The Rite of Spring. As a movie, it’s merely bad; as a bad movie, it’s not bad enough to be good. Best/worst scene: the pool, which had us laughing from the moment the electric palm trees light up. As a movie: ★ / As a bad movie: ★★ (CC).

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