Twelve movies

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

Terror on a Train (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1953). In Birmingham, England, a saboteur plants a bomb on a train that carries sea mines. An engineer (Glenn Ford, playing a Canadian abroad) is called in to help. There’s little real suspense here: we can be confident that Ford isn’t going to be killed and that he and his wife (Anne Vernon) will be back together when the movie ends (neither of those statements will prove a spoiler for anyone who’s watched movies). The fun here comes from local color — a pub, a refreshment room, a train-loving eccentric (Herbert C. Walton) — and mid-century tech, with telephones and train machinery galore. ★★★ (TCM)

*

High Wall (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). Starring Robert Taylor, Audrey Totter, Herbert Marshall, and Amnesia. A WWII veteran (Taylor) is accused of his wife’s murder, and he doesn’t remember a thing. In a psychiatric hospital, he bonds with a doctor (Totter), and with the help of sodium pentothal, he begins to piece together a narrative featuring a sinister publishing executive (Marshall). The story is thin, but Paul Vogel’s cinematography makes this movie another good old good one from our household’s favorite year in movies. ★★★ (TCM)

*

A Lady Without Passport (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1950). Hedy Lamaar is a Buchenwald survivor awaiting permission to emigrate to the United States from Cuba. John Hodiak is an immigration agent. George Macready is the head of a human-smuggling group. Many interesting on-location shots of metropolitan Cuba, a great score by David Raksin, and closing atmospherics straight out of Gun Crazy (also by Lewis), but a drearily glamorous and at times highly confusing story. ★★ (TCM)

*

The Man with a Cloak (dir. Fletcher Markle, 1951). Joseph Cotten is the man, a mysterious New Yorker known as Dupin, enmeshed in the affairs of a dysfunctional household: a wealthy old French expatriate (Louis Calhern), a housekeeper and mistress (Barabra Stanwyck), a butler, a cook — all of whom are waiting for the old man to die — and his grandson’s lover (Leslie Caron), who has traveled from France to plead with the old man to give money to aid the cause of revolution. There’s a mystery to be solved — a missing will — and, lo, Dupin solves it. Sheer hokum, with clues abounding, and I’m not going to spoil the fun. With another great score by David Raksin. ★★★ (TCM)

*

13 West Street (dir. Philip Leacock, 1962). “I felt like an animal”: mild-mannered engineer Walt Sherill (Alan Ladd in his last starring role) is beaten by a gang of teenagers, and when the police (in the form of Rod Steiger) do little about it, Walt takes matters into his own hands. The interesting thing about this Death Wish-like story is that the gang members are from what are called “fine familes,” though maybe not so fine after all. (When Margaret Hayes plays the gang leader’s mother, drinking the day away by her pool, you know there’s trouble). The most compelling character here is the gang leader himself (Michael Callan), a budding psychopath whose unwillingness to step away from a confrontation brings about disastrous consequences. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Common Law (dir. Paul L. Stein, 1931). Constance Bennett again, as Valerie West, a beautiful free spirit in Paris who leaves her much older lover (Lew Cody) to work as a model for the thoroughly respectable painter John Neville (Joel McCrea). Alas, John’s sister has ideas about the kind of woman her brother should marry, and Valerie ain’t it. A surprisingly grim story of gossip, rigid mores, and the need for dissembling: Valerie cannot even let John’s family know that they sailed to the States on the same ship. A strange surprise: Hedda Hopper. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Paterson (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2016). I watched for a second time, with friends, after visiting the Great Falls, and I found myself warming to the movie’s depiction of dailiness: small bright spots (cupcakes for sale), adversities small and large (a crooked mailbox, a destroyed notebook), and routines (walking the dog, getting a beer). Poetry is everywhere in the city: a man in a laundromat, a schoolgirl waiting for her mom, a visitor from Japan. And I loved the absolutely non-condescending depiction of a city with pride in its hometown heroes (Lou Costello, Uncle Floyd). But Paterson (Adam Driver), the bus driver and poet at the center of things, is still a cipher. ★★★ (AP)

*

It Ain’t Over (dir Sean Mullin, 2022). A documentary about the life of Yogi Berra, with numerous interviews and great archival footage (I count ninety names in the IMDb credits). I knew something of Yogi Berra as a speaker of Zen-like sentience, but I didn’t know what a great baseball player he was, nor did I know that his appearance made him a subject of mockery on and off the field, nor did I know that in retirement he supported LGBTQ inclusion in sports. There’s a lot I didn’t know about Yogi Berra. The most exciting moments herein: Don Larsen’s perfect game and the Berra-Jackie Robinson dispute over a call at home plate. ★★★★ (N)

[I say he was safe.]

*

Plan 9 from Outer Space (dir. Edward D. Wood Jr., 1957). Everyone should see Plan 9 once. The first time through, its absurdities are guaranteed to amuse: the deadly serious Criswell, the laughable special effects, the incoherent plot, Tor Johnson’s “acting,” Bela Lugosi’s “double,” Vampira’s waist, the alien visitor’s passionate denunciation of humankind: “Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!” Repeated viewings tend to make the movie feel longer and longer and longer. Which makes me wonder: is there any great bad movie that rewards repeated viewing? ★★★★ (YT)

*

Mysterious Intruder (dir. William Castle, 1946). “Have we seen this?” “It doesn’t look familiar.” “Wait — this part does.” Yeah, and it’s still a dud, albeit a stylish dud. ★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Noirvember Essentials

The Maltese Falcon (dir. John Huston, 1941). I’ve watched it many times, but never with as much appreciation for Mary Astor or with less appreciation for Humphrey Bogart. Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a quick-thinking manipulator, trying out lies, one after another, to get Sam Spade in her corner, and the viewer realizes, at some point, that Astor is playing — brilliantly — a character who’s acting. As Sam Spade, Bogart is just acting, woodenly, I’m afraid. A detail I’ve never noticed before: Spade’s bed, visible when he gets the news of Miles Archer’s death at the story’s start, appears to disappear once Miss O’Shaughnessy enters his apartment: the Code at work? ★★★★

*

Road Diary (dir. Thom Zinny, 2024). Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (and E Street Choir), preparing for and going on a world tour after a long hiatus. I’ve never taken to Springsteen’s music, but I found this documentary exciting and solemnly moving by turns. Mortality hangs over everything for a band that’s been together for fifty years: in the deaths of Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, in Patti Scialfa’s cancer, in Springsteen’s awareness that he is the “Last Man Standing,” as a song says (the last living member of his early band the Castiles), in Springsteen’s comment that he’ll keep playing “until the wheels come off,” and in the set list created for the tour. The musical highlights, for me: “Letter to You,” “Mary’s Place,” “Nightshift,” “Last Man Standing,” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” ★★★★ (H)

[As I wrote to a friend who is a (huge) Springsteen fan, “It’ll rip your heart out. Mine’s on the floor.”]

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