Eleven movies, one series

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Classic Film Time, Criterion Channel, DVD, Max, a theater (imagine!), YouTube.]

The House of Fear (dir. Roy William Neill, 1945). Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Doctor Watson (Nigel Bruce) are off to Scotland to investigate the strange doings at Drearcliffe House, the castle home of seven unmarried men who call themselves the Good Comrades. One by one they’re being killed, each receiving an envelope containing orange seeds — seven, then six, and so on. I always find the logic at work in a Holmes story hilariously improbable. And I must wonder how useful Holmes is anyway: his presence at Drearcliffe does nothing to prevent the Comrades from being knocked off one by one though no one seems to have a problem with that. ★★ (YT)

*

He Who Dances on Wood (dir. Jessica Beshir, 2016). A short portrait of Fred Nelson, a man who tap dances on a wooden slab under a Central Park bridge. (He likes the sound.) A lovely portrait of a man for all seasons (literally, dancing in all weathers), doing what he does for the happiness of it, no money invited. Here is the Manhattan I’d like to visit again. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Hair Wolf (dir. Mariama Diallo, 2018). A satiric commentary on cultural appropriation, with white women coming to a Black salon in search of dreads. The twist: the women are quasi-zombies, sucking the life out of Black culture. What’s a stylist to do? Another of the many short, easy-to-overlook movies at the Criterion Channel, and one that won a host of awards. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Daughter of Darkness (dir. Lance Comfort, 1948). Emily (Siobhan McKenna) is a meek, virginal Irish servant-girl working on an English family’s farm. But she has a past — and when that past shows up in England, murder is in the air. A spectacularly creepy Gothic story, with a burning barn, a church organ playing in the middle of the night, and a vicious dog wandering in the rain. Look for Honor Blackman (Goldfinger ) as a farm daughter. (CFT) ★★★★

*

The Man in Grey (dir. Leslie Arliss, 1943). It’s a Gainsborough melodrama, beginning in a London auction house in 1943 and moving back to the nineteenth century to tell the story of two girlhood friends, Hesther and Clarissa (Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert), the first of whom runs away from school for love, the second of whom enters into a loveless marriage with “the man in grey” (as a portrait will depict him), the Marquess of Rohan (James Mason), who was seeking a partner to serve as his “brood sow.” A fortune teller warned Clarissa in girlhood not to trust in the friendship of women, but when she and Hesther cross paths in adulthood at a performance of Othello (Hesther playing Desdemona to Stewart Granger’s Othello), the friendship is rekindled, with complications to follow. A lavish production that moves awfully slowly. Hint: look closely at the actors in the opening auction-house scene. ★★★ (CC)

*

The Violent Years (dir. William Morgan, 1956). A quartet of high-school girls start by robbing gas stations, and things get much worse from there. The screenplay is by Ed Wood, which helps explain the heavyhanded screenplay (a judge lecturing parents) and general weirdness (the scene with the couple in the car). As a movie, it’s hilariously bad, so bad that as trash cinema, it deserves four stars, one for each villainess. My favorite line: “These aren’t kids; these are morons.” ★★★★ (YT)

*

Tender Comrade (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1943). Four defense-plant workers with husbands and a son in military service pool their resources to rent a house and pay a live-in housekeeper (a German immigrant whose husband, too, is also fighting the Nazis). Ginger Rogers and Robert Ryan star, with Madys Christians, Patricia Collinge, Kim Hunter, and Ruth Hussey as the house’s other occupants. Highly uneven, with hokey dialogue, stretches of dismal propaganda, and moments of utter pathos — and I shudder to think how the moments of pathos must have struck audiences in 1943. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, with a title not from Communism but from Robert Louis Stevenson. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Song of Love (dir. Clarence Brown, 1947). A love triangle with music: Robert Schumann (Paul Henreid), Clara Schumann (Katharine Hepburn), and Johannes Brahms (Robert Walker). Great music (with Arthur Rubinstein filling in at the piano), great costumes and sets. It’s difficult for me to imagine the emotions on display here making the right impression on at least some 2024 moviegoers (I recall some of my students laughing during the Homer-Wilma bedroom scene in The Best Years of Our Lives.) A great thing about this movie: it manages to suggest — on film — the magic that sometimes happens with live performance, as when Clara plays a final “Träumerei.” ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Wes Ball, 2024). An extended struggle between rival ape clans, with the occasional human being to complicate matters. So many overtones: from the Iliad, with the cry “For Caesar” echoing “For Patroclus,” to On the Waterfront, with a hero battered as his comrades look on. Visually stunning, incoherent at times, far too long, and screaming sequel as it ends. The best scene, for me: not one of the many spectacular chases or fights but the discovery of the reading primer. ★★★ (T)

*

The Walls Came Tumbling Down (dir. Lothar Mendes, 1946). It’s The Maltese Falcon on the cheap. A priest dies, and a newspaper columnist (Lee Bowman), a semi-mysterious woman (Marguerite Chapman), and several bad guys (George Macready) search for the Bibles that hold the answer to the whereabouts of a missing Leonardo painting of Joshua at the battle of Jericho. Yet another movie billed as film noir in which everything is bright as day. One surprising plus: the use of a dictionary to disarm a gunman. ★★★ (YT)

*

Mind Over Murder (dir. Nanfu Wang, 2022). A six-part documentary series about the Beatrice (Nebraska) Six, three men and three women wrongly convicted in 1989 of the rape and murder of an elderly widow, Helen Wilson. Five of the six charged believed that they had participated. The story that unfolds features a self-styled local hero, a sheriff’s department psychologist, a craven district attorney, a shoddy laboratory analyst, the six men and women convicted, and family members of the victim. What most struck me: a dramatization of the case, staged by a community theater group with a script drawn from official transcripts, seems at first an unnecessary distraction, but it proves to be the emotional high point of the movie, a living lesson in the power of tragic drama to produce catharsis. ★★★★ (M)

*

Crashout (dir. Lewis R. Foster, 1955). An ensemble movie, with a motley group of escaped convicts, the six of thirty-eight who have survived a prison break: an autocratic leader (William Bendix), a wise guy (Arthur Kennedy), a religious fanatic (William Talman), a self-styled ladies’ man (Luther Adler), a basic brute (Gene Evans), and a younger man convicted of murder for what he says was an accident (Marshall Thompson). Their travels — away from prison, but never to true freedom — bring them into contact with a country doctor (Percy Helton), roadhouse denizens, cops, a railroad conductor, and two women who complicate their lives, a failed music student (Gloria Talbott), and a farm woman (Barbara Michaels) with a child out of wedlock. It’s a brutal movie, even by modern standards, and never less than compelling. My favorite scene: the train, with sandwiches. ★★★★ (YT)

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