Eleven movies, one short series

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

Race Street (dir. Edwin L. Marin, 1948). George Raft is a nightclub owner whose lifelong pal (Harry Morgan) is rubbed out by gangsters extorting protection money. Complications follow, as do song-and-dance numbers that do little more than take up time. (Contrast, say, the nightclub number in Drunken Angel, which has a point: it shows us Matsunaga’s determination to perform well-being.) Best moment: Raft blindfolded and sniffing. ★★ (YT)

*

Pee-wee as Himself (dir. Matt Wolf, 2025). Watching this two-part documentary, I was reminded of Richard Zenith’s characterization of Fernando Pessoa’s project of making himself “into fictitious others whose reality threatened to overshadow his own.” So it was with Paul Reubens, whose public persona of Pee-wee Herman for many years more or less obliterated the man: “I hid behind an alter-ego,” he says here. Reubens talks to the camera at length — he’s often funny, often revealing, sometimes evasive, sometimes combative, and there’s a subject that he is willing to broach only in an audio recording made the day before he died. The many clips from live shows, movies, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse included here are pure glee (Reubens’s word for what he wanted to offer his audiences), but that glee had a great cost to its giver. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature René Clair’s Inventive Enchantments

The Ghost Goes West (1935). It’s something of a supernatural screwball comedy: a 19th-century battle of clans leaves a ghost (Robert Donat) with unfinished business stuck in a Scottish castle. When the castle is taken apart to be reconstructed in Florida, the ghost goes along, as does his descendant (also Donat). Some wonderful moments and droll dialogue, and Eugene Pallette does much to enliven the proceedings. But the comedy is often labored, and once again I find that I’m just not the audience for most screwball comedies. ★★

It Happened Tomorrow (1944). Charmant is the only word that will do to characterize this movie. In a turn-of-the-century American city, newspaper reporter Larry Stevens (Dick Powell) gets a recurring gift from a strange little man: the next day’s newspaper, and thus Larry becomes a remarkably prescient reporter, writing up the news before it happens. When he gets the next day’s paper that reports his own death, the stage is set for a wild conclusion. With Linda Darnell and Jack Oakie as partners in a phony mindreading act. ★★★★

*

Rome, Open City (dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945). I have known the term “open” only in relation to American hotbeds of vice, so I looked it up: an open city is a wartime city that’s given up its defensive efforts. It’s 1944, and Rome is an open city, under Nazi occupation. We are among members of the Resistance (who haven’t given up), in a world where betrayal, torture, and death are constant dangers. It’s a brutal film (how could it not be?) with unforgettable scenes of courage and pain: witness Pina (Anna Magnani) running down the street and Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi) blessing the atheist Luigi (Marcello Pagliero). ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Mask of Diijon (dir. Lew Landers, 1946). You had me at Erich von Stroheim: he stars as Diijon, a celebrated magician who’s turned to studying the mind. When his new hypnotism act goes wrong, he decides to exact revenge on those he blames. Not much here to admire aside from Stroheim, who has the uncanny gift of looking like he’s about the burst into tears even when he’s being utterly vicious. Come for the guillotine; stay for the weird cigarette lighter. ★★ (YT)

*

Good-Time Girl (dir. David MacDonald, 1948). Wayward fifteen-year-old Lyla Lawrence (Diana Dors) listens to a juvenile-court official tell the cautionary tale of wayward sixteen-year-old Gwen Rawlings (Jean Kent), who fled her dysfunctional family for the dangers of city life on her own. Trouble followed, of course: a predatory neighbor, the girls at an “approved school,” a nightclub denizen and his crowd, two AWOL American servicemen. Herbert Lom is a suave nightclub owner who knows his limit when it comes to helping others; Bonar Colleano is one of the ugly Americans. It’s no spoiler to say that Gwen’s story will have the proper effect on Lyla. ★★★ (YT)

*

Good Night, and Good Luck (dir. Micah Bickham and David Cromer, 2025). A stage adaptation of the 2005 film, written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, with Clooney as Edward R. Murrow. The drama’s relevance in 2025 cannot be overstated: whole swaths of Murrow’s commentary on events speak to our perilous times. I’m not much for live theater, but I was especially struck by the elements of media here — archival footage of Murrow and the junior Senator from Wisconsin, and a stage set reminiscent of a computer screen divided into several windows. I’m sorry to have to say that there’s an outrageous irony in a performance of this play being aired on CNN, which of course is deeply complicit in the rise of the several-times-bankrupt reality-TV star from Queens. ★★★★ (CNN)

*

Gunman in the Streets (dir. Frank Tuttle, 1950). Dane Clark stars as Eddy Roback, an American military deserter and criminal stuck in Paris, trying to make it to Belgium. Simone Signoret is his bafflingly loyal girlfriend. The premise recalls that of High Sierra, but Eddy, unlike Humphrey Bogart’s Roy Earle, has no redeeming qualities: he’s a brute. Filmed on location, giving the viewer the opportunity to see mid-century Parisian locations, including a department store. ★★★

*

Misericordia (dir. Alain Guiraudie, 2024). The baker in a French village dies, and a young baker whom he mentored (Félix Kysyl) returns to pay his respects. Complications follow, all centering on the mentee, in a tangle of grievances, longings, mushrooms, and violence. An extremely dark comedy, teeming with implications, beautifully filmed. Imagine Columbo in a French village, but minus a detective. ★★★★ (CC)

*

This Side of the Law (dir. Richard L. Bare, 1950). Any movie that opens with someone trapped at the bottom of a cistern is likely to keep me watching. This one is something of a Gothic noir, with a lawyer (Robert Douglas) who schemes to have a vagrant (Kent Smith) impersonate a look-alike missing heir. Most of the story plays out at San Souci (irony alert), an estate inhabited by the heir’s wife (Viveca Lindfors) and her sister (Janis Paige) and brother-in-law (Calder Taylor). There appears to be little to do for the residents but sit around and sometimes play the piano — at least until the long-lost impostor shows up. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Surgeon’s Cut (dir. Lucy Blakstad, Stephen Cooter, James Newton, and Sophie Robinson, 2020). An episode of the podcast What It’s Like to Be about the brain surgeon Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa put me onto the four-part series about extraordinary surgeons: the transplant specialist Nancy Ascher, the fetal medicine specialist Kypros Nicolaides, the heart surgeon Devi Shetty, and “Dr. Q,” as he’s known, himself. These surgeons present as models of compassion and clarity, reassuring patients, speaking with frankness when the news is not good, and recognizing always that they carry people’s lives in their gifted hands. Don’t be put off by the prospect of watching surgeons at work: it’s more breathtaking than horrifying. Dr. Q’s story is especially timely: he came to the United States from Mexico as an undocumented immigrant with no English and went on to UC Berkeley and Harvard Medical School. ★★★★ (N)

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