Ten movies, two series

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

Invitation (dir. Gottfried Reinhardt, 1952). Dorothy McGuire is Ellen Bowker Pierce, a rich young newlywed with a respiratory ailment that’s soon to end her life. Her greatest happiness is to see her husband Dan (Van Johnson) off to work (he’s “doing beautifully in business”) before planning the evening’s dinner. The couple’s happiness is threatened not only by the future but by what lies in the past: the machinations of Ellen’s father (Louis Calhern) and Dan’s inconclusive relationship with the venomous Maud Redwick (Ruth Roman). Soap opera with a difference, so weird and so good. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

23 Paces to Baker Street (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1956). A recently blind playwright (Van Johnson) overhears bits of a shady conversation in a London pub, and he, his ex-fiancée (Vera Miles), and his butler (Cecil Parker) join forces to figure it out. The police, of course, aren’t interested. Amateur sleuthing at its finest, with some clever deductions (Baker Street, get it?), a dip into Burke’s Peerage, echoes of The Lady from Shanghai and Rear Window, and a scene that must have influenced Wait Until Dark. Look for the indefatigable Estelle Winwood as a barmaid. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Make Haste to Live (dir. William A. Seiter, 1954). The backstory is daft: when a mobster’s wife (Dorothy McGuire) discovers what he’s all about and disappears to make a new life with a new name, the mobster (Stephen McNally) ends up taking the rap for her murder. And now the mobster is out of prison and making his way into his wife’s new life. The movie’s end is telegraphed early on, too early, and it’s difficult to think that anyone is ever really in danger here. The creepiest element in the movie: the mobster’s interest in his daughter (Mary Murphy). ★★ (YT)

*

Man in the Attic (dir. Hugo Fregonese, 1953). Another take on Jack the Ripper, with a real Jack (Palance) as Mr. Slade (ahem), a pathologist who rents a room to live in and an attic in which to conduct unexplained experiments. The house in which he’s renting is owned by the Harleys, a pleasant couple (Frances Bavier and Rhys Williams) whose niece, the beautiful actress Lily Bonner (Constance Smith) comes to live with them. Did I mention that Mr. Slade’s mother was an actress who ended up a prostitute, and that he has removed all the pictures of actresses that graced the walls of his room? Lots of atmosphere, lots of fog (a “London particular,” as Dickens called it), and lots of menace. ★★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Neo-Noir feature

Night Moves (dir. Arthur Penn, 1975). “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” A faded movie star hires a private eye (Gene Hackman) to find her runaway daughter (Melanie Griffith), and he uncovers a criminal scheme that will end up taking several lives. Some exciting moments, but an awful lot of painful dialogue, and I’m aware that I used up two sentences to give an example. ★★

Obsession (dir. Brian De Palma, 1976). I’m a Vertigo obsessive, so I’m surprised that I’d never heard of this movie before finding it at Criterion. It’s a brilliant homage, recasting Hitchcock’s Orpheus-and-Eurydice premise in novel and outrageous terms, with many deft touches to please a Vertigo fan. Cliff Robertson, Geneviève Bujold, and John Lithgow are the principals. A bonus: Bernard Herrmann’s last score. ★★★★

Eyewitness (dir. Peter Yates, 1981). When janitor Daryll Deever (William Hurt) discovers a dead body in the office building where he works, he claims more knowledge of the murder than he has in an attempt to establish a relationship with local-television reporter Toni Sokolow (Sigourney Weaver), the object of his long-standing obsession. Meanwhile, Deever suspects and fears that his friend and fellow janitor (James Woods) is the killer. Capable performances (the leads, Morgan Freeman, Christopher Plummer, Irene Worth) and some moments of genuine suspense, but also a considerable number of inanities (fleeting attempts to give minor characters more depth), plot holes, and a bonkers conclusion that might be meant to echo Strangers on a Train but feels laughable. And the movie never seems to allow that there’s anything stalker-y about Deever’s obsession. ★★

Absence of Malice (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1981). Sally Field is Megan Carter, a Miami journalist who writes a story asserting that liquor distributor and bootlegger’s son Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman) is under investigation in the disappearance of a union official. Yes, he’s under investigation; that much is true. Many complications follow; the plot becomes increasingly convoluted; and the movie struggles to make Carter and Gallagher’s off-and-on relationship appear plausible. That this movie has garnered so much praise amazes me. ★★

*

Ten Cents a Dance (dir. Lionel Barrymore, 1931). Taxi dancer Barbara O’Neill (Barbara Stanwyck) has a wealthy admirer in Bradley Carlton (Ricardo Cortez), but she falls for her luckless boarding-house chum Eddie Miller (Monroe Owsley), gets him a job with Carlton, and marries him, only to learn that he’s stolen from Carlton’s company to cover stock-market losses. Stanwyck gives a terrific performance — kind, seductive, desperate, indignant, and fiercely assertive by turns. Cortez and Owsley are, well, adequate. Fun to think about how the story might have developed post-Code. ★★★ (YT)

*

State and Main (dir. David Mamet, 2000). A struggling film production (“I need eight hundred grand”) comes to a small town in Vermont to shoot, but the old mill that was to give the movie its title burned down decades ago, and comic complications and a crisis of conscience ensue. I suspect that many a viewer watching this movie will think of Gilmore Girls (which began in 2000), but the inspiration there and here is Preston Sturges. A spectacular ensemble cast, with William H. Macy as an addled director, Alec Baldwin and Sarah Jessica Parker as troublesome stars, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a writer-naif in the world of pictures, and Rebecca Pidgeon as an adorable bookstore owner. My favorite line is about making your own fun, something anyone living in a small town should understand: “If you don’t make it yourself, it ain’t fun — it’s entertainment.” ★★★★ (CC)

*

Empire Falls (dir. Fred Schepisi, 2005). An adaptation of Richard Russo’s novel about life in a Maine town whose mill has shut down, with three generations of characters present and past. At the center of things is Miles Roby (Ed Harris), a divorced father with a daughter (Danielle Panabaker), an indentured servant of sorts presiding over the Empire Grill, a George Bailey who’s never broken away from Empire Falls, nor from Martha’s Vineyard, where he takes a modest vacation every year for reasons he cannot (yet) admit. Yes, he’s borne back ceaselessly into the past, a point made abundantly clear. This two-parter is more than slightly disjointed as it begins, with a considerable amount of exposition, but it gets better and better as it goes on, with considerable darkness and ample light. With Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Hunt, Paul Newman, and many more, including Joanne Woodward as town matriarch Mrs. Whiting, the Mr. Potter to Miles’s George Bailey. ★★★★ (M)

*

Olive Kitteridge (dir. Lisa Cholodenko, 2014). A four-part miniseries from Elizabeth Strout’s stories, set in a town in Maine, focused on twenty-five years in the lives of a junior-high math teacher, Olive Kitteridge (Frances McDormand) and her pharmacist husband Henry (Richard Jenkins). Olive is no-nonsense truth-teller who seems (seems) righteously devoid of self-doubt; her husband Henry is the incarnation of kindness and patience, even if his kindness is at times colored by other impulses. Familial tensions, accusations, regrets, and, sometimes, the possibility of happiness. The best line: “It baffles me, this world; I don’t want to leave it yet.” ★★★★ (M)

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