Twelve movies

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

The Young Stranger (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1957). Frankenheimer’s directing debut is a low-budget, emotionally muted variation on Rebel Without a Cause. After repeatedly annoying fellow moviegoers, a feisty teenager, Hal (James MacArthur, later of Hawaii 5–0), slugs the theater manager (Whit Bissell) and claims self-defense. Hal’s emotionally unavailable father (James Daly) doesn’t believe his son; Hal’s mother (Kim Hunter), who looks almost young enough to be her son’s older sister, has long been torn about remaining in her marriage; a police sergeant (James Gregory) is surprisingly helpful in effecting a resolution. Best moment: Dad making martinis. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Missing Juror (dir. Budd Boetticher, 1944). A man (George Macready) is wrongly convicted of murder and saved from execution, only to go mad and kill himself. And then the jurors from his case begin to turn up dead. Gosh, who’d want to kill them? Despite astonishing IMDb reviews (“one of the great over-looked film noirs,” “not noir but definitely not mediocre!!”), it’s a painfully dumb effort for all involved. ★ (YT)

*

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (dir. Joseph Sargent, 1974). That is, the hijacking of a subway train that left Pelham Bay Park station in the Bronx at 1:23 p.m. The premise is absurd, and it’s not helped by the preposterous disguises of the four hijackers and the deadpan New Yorkese of Walter Matthau and Jerry Stiller as New York City Transit Police lieutenants, but maybe this movie is really a very dark comedy disguised as a thriller. Perhaps the best reason to watch is the chance for an extended look at New York City streets and trains (the latter graffiti-free, at the insistence of the Transit Authority) in the dilapidated Manhattan of the 1970s. But for a train out of control, watch The French Connection. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Rashomon (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1950). I’m not embarrassed to say that I’d never seen Rashomon before: as I always told my students, you come to things when you come to them. Here’s a story (starring Toshiro Mifune as a roving bandit) of appalling sudden violence, told from four irreconcilable perspectives. I see the movie as pulling the viewer in two directions: toward the contemplation of an ever more fascinating indeterminacy (“Now it’s getting interesting,” a character says) and toward ethical action that puts that fascination off to the side (sorry, no spoilers). My years in lit crit lead me to think of it as the difference between theory and practice. ★★★★ (CC)

*

My Mom Jayne (dir. Mariska Hargitay, 2025). Mariska Hargitay, who was just three when Jayne Mansfield died in a horrific auto accident, looks into the life of a mother she barely remembers. Revelation after revelation follows, and a complicated network of family relationships begins to take shape (no spoilers). I know that this documentary is meant to end on a note of healing and reconciliation, but it left me with immense sadness about the life and work of a woman who made terrible choices in her private life (“problematic,” Hargitay says) and who was complicit in her public commodification. Saddest scene: Mansfield gamely playing the violin for Jack Paar, who couldn’t have cared less. ★★★★ (M)

*

Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (dir. Eva Orner, 2019 ). Bikram Choudhury is a yoga teacher who claims to have invented Bikram Yoga, a form of hot yoga, performed by hundreds of students in a sweltering studio as he walks about in a skimpy bathing suit, issuing directives and admonitions. In filmed depositions, he appears as an arrogant, manipulative, predatory creature who creates his own reality and expects others to accept it. Mark Quigley, attorney: “In his head, he thinks what he says is the truth, even though the evidence is right there — clearly what he’s saying it is not true — he’ll say it.” Our household began watching documentaries about cults and their leaders for the morbid entertainment value, but now when we watch, we’re reminded again and again of the current occupant of the White House. ★★★★ (M)

*

Terror at Midnight (dir. Franklin Adreon, 1956). A solid B-picture from Republic. The premise: the fiancée (Joan Vohs) of a newly promoted police detective (Scott Brady) hits a cyclist, drives away after getting bad advice (from Percy Helton!), and finds herself subject to the crude overtures of an auto repairman (Frank Faylen, Ernie in It’s a Wonderful Life ), while her fiancé is hit up for blackmail. Brady and Vohs, the nominal stars, offer little of interest: the real reason to watch is the marital nightmare of auto repairman Fred and his alcoholic wife Helen (Virginia Gregg, who was the voice of Norman Bates’s mother). Fred and Helen’s toxic partnership recalls that of Al and Vera (Tom Neal and Ann Savage) in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour — i.e., yow! ★★★ (YT)

*

Crumb (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 1994). Though I once wrote that I could watch this documentary again and again, this one additional viewing, inspired by the news of a R. Crumb biography, will be enough for me. “It’s grim,” Crumb says at one point, and the documentary explores a story of immense sadness, in which Crumb himself appears as the one relatively well-adjusted member of a family beset by parental brutality, mental illness, and emotional torment. Note: relatively well-adjusted: Crumb is, for me, a brilliant artist, but he also presents as a man who never moved past the resentment and self-styled superiority of a high-school outcast (is that how curmudgeons get started?). Lots of art and many scenes of Crumb at work. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Illicit (dir. Archie Mayo, 1931). Ann (Barbara Stanwyck) is a woman with what her wealthy beau Dick (James Rennie) calls “theories,” the main one being that marriage is the death of love. She’d prefer to continue “overnighting”: it’s a pre-Code world, so who cares people say? Tune in to learn what happens when these two do finally wed. With Joan Blondell, Charles Butterworth, Ricardo Cortez, and Natalie Moorhead as additional incarnations of the very idle rich. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Millie (dir. John Francis Dillon, 1931). Helen Twelvetrees is Millie, a woman who marries young, is betrayed by her lout of a husband, gives her daughter over to her now-ex-husband and mother-in-law, and resolves to live independently, starting out at a cigar counter and rising to better things. And she enters into a freewheeling nightlife with two friends (Joan Blondell and Lilyan Tashman, who share a bed, apparently because they can’t afford better lodgings). When a fancy banker whom Millie rejected takes an interest in her now-seventeen-year-old daughter (Anita Louise), Millie isn’t having it. A remarkable pre-Code picture of fierce female independence. ★★★ (YT)

*

Vanity Street (dir. Nick Grinde, 1932). A hungry unhoused urbanite, Jeanie Gregg (Helen Chandler, Mina to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula), throws a brick through a drugstore window so that she’ll be arrested and get a decent meal in jail. Instead, police detective Brian Murphy (Charles Bickford) takes pity on her, and Miss Gregg (somehow) becomes a successful showgirl, until Mr. Murphy (it’s all very formal) has to arrest her for a murder of which she’s wrongly accused. Fun pre-Code stuff, with several moments that would never have made it past the censors a couple of years later. Bonus: Mayo Methot, later to be Humphrey Bogart’s partner in (mutual) domestic violence, as a faded star of the stage. ★★★ (YT)

*

Hot Summer Night (dir. David Friedkin, 1957). Leslie Nielsen plays Bill Partain, an out-of-work journalist (newspaper merger) on his honeymoon who hopes to get his job back by scoring an interview with a legendary Ozarks crime boss who’s hiding out after a bank robbery and murder. Bill’s wife Irene (Colleen Miller) appears to have much more common sense, and it’s she who takes action when Bill is held for ransom by the boss and his gang. Horribly overwrought dialogue makes much of the movie feel like a bad play. But there’s a score by André Previn, and some genuine excitement once Irene takes charge. ★★★ (TCM)

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