Twelve movies

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

Two Trains Runnin’ (dir. Sam Pollard, 2016). This documentary looks back at events in Mississippi in the summer of 1964: the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and the efforts of two trios of white blues fanatics to find Son House and Skip James. The two trains, or narrative threads — racist brutality and music — never quite come together, despite a coda about the relationship between music and political change. And the contemporary performances that crop up between interviews and documentary footage ring painfully false: musicians in costume (hats, overalls) offering sad approximations of music they no doubt love (“Freight Train” is the worst). Best moments: Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Newport Folk Festival, playing “Shake ’Em On Down” as dancers move about him; Skip James, also at Newport, unfilmed but caught in photographs, singing “Devil Got My Woman” — a moment of high art that the filmmakers treat with the reverence it merits. ★★★ (YT)

[Gotta point out: Henry Vestine and Alan Wilson, both of whom figure in the story, were founding members of Canned Heat. Why’d they leave that out?]

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Gothic Noir feature

When Strangers Marry (dir. William Castle, 1944). Elaine thinks parts must have been left on the cutting-room floor; I think this B-noir is more subtly constructed than we first suspected. It’s the story of an Ohio waitress, Millie (Kim Hunter), who marries a salesman (Dean Jagger) after three dates and follows him to the big city (New York), only to find that he’s not in town and that she doesn’t really know what he’s all about. Robert Mitchum plays another salesman, a former suitor eager to lend Millie a hand. Strong overtones of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and a bonus: what must be the most consequential mail chute in all film. ★★★★

The Sign of the Ram (dir. John Sturges, 1948). Intense psychodrama in a big old house, and something of a twin to Guest in the House (dir. John Brahm, 1944), in which a newcomer to a family undermines relationships. Here it’s a second wife, Leah St. Aubyn (Susan Peters), who does the damage: paralyzed from the waist down after saving two step-children from drowning, she mistrusts her husband (Alexander Knox), fears the imagined wiles of her new secretary (Phyllis Thaxter), undermines her older step-children’s romances with appalling lies (thereby keeping the children from leaving her), and gets a steady narcissistic supply from her youngest step-child, all while writing sentimental verse for newspaper publication. This movie was Susan Peters’s first and last after the hunting accident that left her paralyzed. Her performance here suggests a great loss to film. ★★★★

Lightning Strikes Twice (dir. King Vidor, 1951). Actress Shelley Carnes (Ruth Roman) travels to a dude ranch for her health and falls in love with local rancher Richard Trevelyan (Richard Todd), just acquitted of murdering his wife. But if he didn’t do it, who did? Zachary Scott plays Trev’s lecherous friend; Mercedes McCambridge does lots of emoting as the co-owner of the dude ranch. The confusing directions for driving to the ranch suggest to me the problem with the movie: too many odd, puzzling points — why, for instance, does an old ranching couple have an enormous portrait of Trev above their fireplace? ★★★

*

The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne, 2023). It’s 1970, and Paul Giamatti is Paul Hunham, a teacher of classics at a Massachusetts boarding school, bowtied, lazyeyed, pedantic, pompous, and punished by being assigned to watch over the small band of students stuck at the school over the Christmas and New Year’s break. One of them: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a smart, rebellious student beset by family woes. Also wintering over: Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), head cook, and the mother of a recent graduate. All I’ll say is that The Hoidovers is the kind of movie that I’m willing to follow wherever it goes — it’s just that good, and I suspect it might be the best new movie I see all year. ★★★★ (DVD)

*

Outside the Law (dir. Jack Arnold, 1956). This year I’ve seen movies about Johnnies: Johny Saxon, Johnny Eager, and here’s Johnny Salvo (Ray Danton), a paroled con and war hero, up for a pardon if he helps catch a gang of counterfeiters. Nothing much to see here, but son-father conflict (Danton and Judson Pratt) and a love-hate triangle add some interest, and the musical score — from five composers, including Henry Mancini — is consistently interesting. But for a story focused on tracking down the sources for the counterfeiters’ materials, there’s mighty little on the screen about paper. My favorite line: “Come on, Bormann, firms twice your size don’t use half the stationery you do!” ★★ (YT)

*

Shadow of a Doubt (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1943). The story of a serial killer, Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten), paying a visit to his sister’s family in Santa Rosa, the Newtons: Joe (Henry Travers), Emma (Patricia Collinge), and their three children, most especially, young Charlie (Teresa Wright), the namesake who shares a deep bond with her glamorous uncle. I never tire of this movie. Watching it this time, I paid attention to the ways in which Thornton Wilder’s screenplay keeps the viewer off balance, making it possible to forget now and then that Uncle Charlie is — hey, wait a minute! — a serial killer. My favorite scene, forever: the library at closing time. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Steel Trap (dir. Andrew Stone, 1952). Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright as a married couple, Jim and Laurie Osborne, with the weirdness factor lessened by Wright’s changed appearance (her hair is blonde) and her minimal role. It’s really a one-actor movie, with Cotten as an assistant bank manager whose interior monologue lets us into his plan to make off to Brazil (no extradition) with his wife and a heavy suitcase of cash from the vault. He has one weekend to pull it off before the bank switches to its winter hours: he must develop a persuasive story to tell his wife (a weekend getaway to manage a big bank deal), arrange care for his young daughter (who is supposed to follow), and obtain passports and schedule flights, with contingencies complicating his scheme at every turn. The movie has lots of suspense (certainly at least a four-dollar-rental’s worth) and strongly suggests that anyone is capable of becoming a criminal: “We have only so many days, so many hours, so many minutes to live, and we’re suckers if we don’t cram into them all the happiness we can get away with, regardless of how we do it.” ★★★ (V)

[I learned about this movie from Jerome Wesselberry’s review of Shadow of a Doubt. Jerome, whoever she is (the name is an alias), is a very smart watcher of movies. Thanks, Steven, for recommending her channel.]

*

The Bottom of the Bottle (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1956). Joseph Cotten as Pat Martin, “P.M.,” an Arizona attorney and rancher. He’s stuck in a loveless (and likely sexless) marriage to Nora (Ruth Roman), and he’s now confronted with the unexpected arrival of his brother Donald (Van Johnson), a convict and recovering alcoholic who’s escaped from Joliet (which everyone pronounces as Jolly-ette). Too many histrionic moments, but strong performances from Johnson and Roman. Cotten does a good job of suggesting just how much of his family history he’s been trying to forget: “Spend your life building up something worthwhile, and along comes the past.” ★★★ (YT)

*

Come Live with Me (dir. Clarence Brown, 1941). Modern marriage: a publisher and his wife are both having affairs — he with Johnny Jones (Hedy Lamarr), a Viennese emigre about to be deported unless she marries. Enter Bill Smith (Jimmy Stewart), a down-and-out writer willing to marry Johnny in exchange for a chunk of money. But can these two ever really fall in love? Yes, Hedy Lamarr is astonishingly beautiful, as Bill points out, but walking away with the movie is Adeline De Walt Reynolds as Bill’s wise old grandmother, who makes everything come out right, and it’s in her pastoral world that Bill recites, sort of, a bit of Christopher Marlowe’s poem. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Four Daughters (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1938). Sweet nonsense, mostly, with Claude Rains as a music master with four unmarried musical daughters (Lola Lane, Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, and Gale Page). A variety of eligible men are on and off the premises, the most charming of whom is a composer (Jeffrey Lynn), the most interesting of whom is an embittered pianist and orchestrator (John Garfield, in his first film role) who grows fond of the pluckiest sister, Emma (Priscilla Lane). Things get surprisingly dark as the movie nears its end, before everything turns to sweet nonsense once again. A bonus: lots of Gershwinesque music at the piano, the work (I think) of Max Rabinowitz and Heinz Roemheld. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Razor’s Edge (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1946). “The road to salvation is difficult to pass through, as difficult as the sharp edge of a razor”: so says an anonymous Indian holy man (Cecil Humphreys), paraphrasing the Upanishads, in this adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel. There, and here, a traumatized WWI veteran, Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power) sets out in search of the meaning of life, working as a laborer yet hobnobbing with a wealthy set (Anne Baxter, John Payne, Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, with Herbert Marshall as Maugham, a wise elder passing through now and then). Tragedies befall the set, as Larry keeps his eye on the prize — which is what, exactly? On the one hand this movie feels like sheer malarkey; on the other it’s an assembling of great performances, particularly from Baxter and Tierney. ★★★★ (TCM)

[The movie’s themes were timely: “There was a surge of American GIs joining monasteries after the end of the Second World War, seeking solace and refuge in a violent and increasingly complicated world.” Here’s a short film about the last days of an American Trappist monastery founded by 1947 as a daughter house of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani (where Thomas Merton was a monk).]

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