[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Source: Criterion Channel.]
From the Criterion Channel feature Cast Against Type: Heroes as Villains
In Name Only (dir. John Cromwell, 1939). Alec (Cary Grant) is trapped in a loveless marriage to Maida (Kay Francis). When Alex meets Julie (Carole Lombard), a young widow, love is in the air. But Maida refuses to let her husband go. I would like to see the story with a pre-Code resolution: what’s here is pretty ridic. ★★★
*
Wildcat (dir. Ethan Hawke, 2024). Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor, Laura Linney as her mother Regina, with each actor playing a host of characters in scenes from O’Connor’s fiction. The acting is fine; the cinematography is beautiful; but the movie does little to allow a viewer into O’Connor’s life and fiction. If you don’t know, say, that “Cal,” never identified otherwise, is the poet Robert Lowell, or that “Elizabeth” is Hardwick, not Bishop, or that Lowell and O’Connor met at Yaddo (never identified, not even in a caption), or what Yaddo is, you might find yourself in the dark. A colossal disappointment. ★★
*
The Double Life of Véronique (dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991). Irène Jacob as two women: Weronika, a Polish soprano, and Véronique, a French music teacher. Yes, they look alike, and eerie, inexplicable synchronicities join their lives, in ways that are clearer to the viewer than they can be to either character. I’d describe the movie as a quieter, less glossy, more dreamlike (not nightmarish) version of a David Lynch movie. Strangest scene: the puppeteer’s explanation of why he has two puppets. ★★★★
*
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy
Blue (1993). I know that the three parts of the trilogy focus on liberty, equality, and fraternity, but I’d think of this film and White as being about how to go on after a great loss. Julie (Juliette Binoche) loses her husband (a celebrated composer) and young daughter in an auto accident and makes a new life in a world filled with blue — a bedroom, a glass mobile, the water in a swimming pool, the ink in a pen. It’s a life of letting go: a grievous revelation about her dead husband (yet another loss) moves her to an extraordinary act of generosity. And it’s a life of artistic invention, finally out in the open. ★★★★
White (1994). Here comes the bride, Parisienne Dominique (Julie Delpy), all dressed in, yes, that — but her husband Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) cannot, uh, perform, so back he goes to Warsaw (hidden in a suitcase). Imagine Chaplin’s tramp attaining improbable wealth and then plotting revenge on an ex — that’s what happens in this darkly funny and crafty story. If equality is the theme here, it would seem to be an equality of misery — each partner inflicting it on the other. So many little details to register across these movies — for instance, the bent elder at a recycling receptacle — and fleeting cameos of each movie’s lead in the other. ★★★★
Red (1994). Fraternity, by way of contingency, with one final recycled bottle. The most mysterious third of the trilogy, in ways that make me resist even attempting to sketch the story. And it offers one of the most satisfying and audacious endings I’ve ever seen. With Irène Jacob as a model and student and Jean-Louis Trintignant as a retired judge who eavesdrops on his neighbors’ telephone conversations. ★★★★
*
From the Criterion Channel feature Starring Claudette Colbert
Torch Singer (dir. Alexander Hall and George Somnes, 1933). “I’m gonna find my kid,” says Sally Trent (Colbert), a chorus girl who’s risen to stardom as “Mimi Benton,” torch singer — and from the way characters in this movie talk, torch singing is a plainly disreputable line of work. So it’s something of a shock that Sally/Mimi should prove so successful as “Aunt Jenny,” host of a radio show for children. And in that capacity, Sally hatches a plan to find the child that she (unmarried) gave up for adoption five years before. Fancy gowns and swank parties, but at its heart, a poignant story of a woman’s life in Depression America. ★★★★
The Gilded Lily (dir. Wesley Ruggles, 1935). And here’s a wacky story of a woman’s life in Depression America. Marilyn David (Colbert), a stenographer, enjoys a strictly Platonic friendship with newspaper reporter Peter Dawes (Fred MacMurray), meeting him every Thursday to eat popcorn outside the New York Public Library. When Marilyn meets Lord Granton (Ray Milland), an English aristocrat traveling incognito, complications follow: Marilyn becomes known as the “No” Girl (turning down an aristocrat) and rises to stardom as a nightclub singer and dancer. She even takes up her relationship with Lord Granton again — but Peter and his popcorn have some strong American charm. ★★★
*
From the Criterion Channel feature Argentine Noir
Never Open That Door (dir. Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1952). The door separates good from evil, a brightly lit home from a dark wood (una selva oscura, in Spanish as in Dante’s Italian). The door opens twice in this unusual movie, made from two Cornell Woolrich stories, one about a man seeking to avenge his sister’s suicide, the other about a blind woman longing for the return of her criminal son. It’s the second story which is the clear winner here, going by with long stretches of tense silence and a sudden surprise at the end. Great cinematography by Pablo Tabernero. ★★★★
[From Never Open That Door.]
If I Should Die Before I Wake dir. Carlos Hugo Christensen, 1952). From another Cornell Woolrich story, it was meant to be a third of the preceding movie but ended up as a movie in itself. Strong echoes of M and The Window (the latter also from a Woolrich story), but there a boy told what he knew about a murder and was scoffed at, and here a boy who knows something about a murder, Lucio (Néstor Zavarce), has been sworn to secrecy. When a second classmate disappears, Lucio takes it on himself to find the killer. Utterly gripping and suspenseful, with Tabernero’s cinematography again. ★★★★
The Beast Must Die (dir. Román Viñoly Barreto, 1952). A boy is killed by a hit-and-run driver, and his father, Felix Lane, a writer of murder mysteries (Narciso Ibáñez Menta) takes on the impossible task of finding the culprit in the absence of a single eyewitness. By way of a chance discovery, Felix manages to ingratiate himself with the driver’s family and business associates — with one goal in mind. Fine acting, beautiful cinematography (Alberto Etchebehere), a fun meta element (a movie within the movie), and the blunt morality of Ecclesiastes 3:19. ★★★★
The Black Vampire (dir. Román Viñoly Barreto, 1953). Nathán Pinzón, who appears as a mild-mannered business asociate in The Beast Must Die, plays “el Profesor,” language instructor and killer of little girls in this (alleged) retelling of “un célebre caso policial.” But the movie is, of course, a loose adaptation of an unacknowledged source: Fritz Lang’s M. It was easy for me to decide that this movie is superior to M in every way: a more disturbing killer, a more emotionally complex story (with Olga Zubarry as a nightclub entertainer and mother who spots the killer and remains silent, with consequences she cannot foresee), and long stretches in the dark, literally — in the storm drains of Buenos Aires, where the city’s peddlers and beggars hunt el Profesor (shades of The Third Man and Freaks). “I’m tired of feeling the anguish of every mother,” says an investigator of the crimes, and that anguish, largely missing from M, is to the fore here. ★★★★
The Bitter Stems (dir. Fernando Ayala, 1956). Disenchanted and in debt, Sr. Gasper (Carlos Cores), a Buenos Aires newspaperman, teams up with a Hungarian refugee, Sr. Liudas (Vassili Lambrinos), to create a sham correspondence course for aspiring reporters. And things go so well that Gasper offers Liudas an extra share of the profits so that he can bring his family over from Hungary. But an overheard conversation makes Gasper doubt his partner’s story and hatch a scheme of his own, with unforeseen complications. Great atmosphere, great eerieness, and a vibrant score by Astor Piazzolla. ★★★★
[Argentine noir: who knew? Not me. We tried the remaining film in this feature, Native Son (dir. Pierre Chenal, 1951), with Richard Wright, but the acting was so amateurish that we gave up. I may try again.]
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
