Twelve movies

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

The Mayor of Hell (dir. Archie Mayo, 1933). The premise is preposterous: in a world of political patronage, a gangster, Patsy (James Cagney), is appointed to oversee the staff at a reform school for boys. Dudley Digges is the vicious administrator; Madge Evans is a kindly nurse who doesn’t flinch at Patsy’s underworld ties; Frankie Darro and Allen Hoskins (Our Gang’s “Farina”) are among the school’s inmates. There’s great pathos in the scenes of parents (even the incompetent ones) and children being separated in juvenile court. It’s strange to watch this movie in a time of American concentration camps. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Gambling Lady (dir. Archie Mayo, 1934). Barbara Stanwyck stars as Jennifer Lady Lee, a professional gambler who, like her father, takes pride in winning at cards without cheating. When romance develops between Lady and the wealthy Garry Madison (Joel McCrea), Garry’s vengeful sort-of-ex- (Claire Dodd) complicates life for this class-barrier-breaking pair, and the plot, heretofore at least semi-logical, begins to fall to pieces. Best lines: “I live on the other side of the tracks.” “But you’ll move over.” ★★★ (TCM)

*

Stolen Holiday (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1937). A vehicle for Kay Francis and (not joking) her wardrobe (gowns by Orry-Kelly). She stars as Nicole Picot, whose dress salon brings her great wealth in a collaboration with financier-fraudster (Claude Rains). But another man, a diplomat no less (Ian Hunter), is competing for Nicole’s hand. Francis is such an unusual figure on the screen — tall, imposing, vaguely Lady Gaga-like (to my eyes), dominating scenes even when she doesn’t say a word, and when she does say a word, she has the movie’s best line: “My life’s a maze, and so is yours.” ★★★ (TCM)

*

Nightmare Alley (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1947). From our household’s favorite year in movies, and we seized the chance to introduce old friends to it. Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power), a carny worker with grand aspirations, tramples the dignity of those who love him as he rises to fame as The Great Stanton, nightclub mentalist and, later, charlatan spiritualist. This time around I savored the brief, memorable performance of Ian Keith as Pete, who promises his wife Zeena (Joan Blondell) that he’ll get some breakfast along with his shot of whiskey: “I shall probably have a small orange juice, then two three-minute eggs, melba toast, and coffee.” Another great bit of dialogue, from Stanton: “Slowly shifting their form, visions come.” ★★★★ (DVD)

*

The Night of the Hunter (dir. Charles Laughton, 1955). Another one that we introduced friends to. One of the strangest noirs, a nightmarish fairytale, shifting from domestic life with a psychopathic stepfather to life on the run, as two hunted children find refuge with a maternal protector. My favorite line: “There’s still the river,” which must be meant (or ought to be meant) to recall Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. ★★★★ (DVD)

*

The Incident (dir. Larry Peerce, 1967). A harrowing story, with two young thugs, Joe and Artie (Tony Musante and, in his movie debut, Martin Sheen), terrorizing the passengers in a subway car on a wee-hours ride from the Bronx to Grand Central Station. Joe and Artie choose their victims, one by one (and Martin Niemöller’s poem comes to mind): a passed-out drunk, a recovering alcoholic, a gay man, an old coot, an Army private with a broken arm, a Black man, a glamorous older woman, a glamorous younger woman, a husband and wife with a little girl asleep. What makes this movie wildly different from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three: there’s no practical criminal motive, only the wish to terrify; there are no authorities monitoring events; and the passengers are not merely anonymous (we get something of their backstories as they make their way to the train). Among the passengers: Beau Bridges, Ruby Dee, Jack Gilford, Mike Kellin, Ed McMahon, Gary Merrill, Brock Peters, Thelma Ritter, and Jan Sterling. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Billy Joel: And So It Goes (dir. Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, 2025). I can’t claim to be especially knowledgable about or dedicated to Billy Joel’s music, but as with the Bruce Springsteen effort Road Diary (dir. Thom Zinny, 2024), I find any well-made, detailed documentary about a musician compelling. The most telling comment in this documentary is from Joel himself: “Life is not a musical; it’s a Greek tragedy.” Here are all the highs and lows of his career (minus recent ill health): friendships, betrayals, two suicide attempts, four marriages, several new directions in music, and countless memorable songs. And now I find myself banging out the chords of that insistent bit in “My Life”: Bm/D   Am/D   C7(9)   Ebmaj7/F   Cm6/F   Bb. ★★★★ (H)

[Because this post refers to suicide: If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOf
Suicide.com/resources.]

*

Desire Me (dir. Jack Conway, George Cukor, and Mervyn LeRoy, 1947). Another one from our household’s favorite year in movies, and a strange one, one sign of its strangeness being that it was released without a director’s name. Jean Renaud (Richard Hart) shows up at the Brittany cottage of Marise Aubert (Greer Garson) after escaping from a Nazi concentration camp to report that Marise’s husband Paul (Robert Mitchum) was killed in the escape attempt. Jean knows everything about Marise, is obviously already in love with her, and moves into her house and life in a way that is deeply, disturbingly stalkerish. The big problem here is that Mitchum’s name is next to Garson’s in the credits, so you know that Paul, like Odysseus, is going to show up and clean house. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Alias Mr. Twilight (dir. John Sturges, 1946). Lloyd Corrigan really did star in movies: here he’s a doting grandfather to orphaned five-year-old Susan (Gigi Perreau), a kindly employer to Susan’s nurse Corky (Trudy Marshall), and a charming conman with a suave partner (Al Bridge) in schemes that take the two around the country. The schemes are remarkably clever, and it’s difficult to think that these hardworking men haven’t earned the jewelry and money that comes their way. Things get a bit complicated when Corky’s “fellow” (as Susan calls him) turns out to be a police detective working with the bunco squad. But still, you’ll root for the criminals here. ★★★ (YT)

[Al Bridge, “the Mister” in Sullivan’s Travels, was a familiar face in Preston Sturges’s films. John Sturges, though, was unrelated.]

*

China Moon (dir. John Bailey, 1994). I think I finally understand the rules of neo-noir: the movie will be in color; there will be a barenaked lady or two; and at some point a cheesy extra-diegetic saxophone will let loose. Some nifty plot twists here, but this movie is mostly a recycling of several others, with a portentous but nonsensical trope (a full moon that looks like a china plate) tossed in. The biggest surprise about this movie is that it’s streaming at Criterion Channel. With Ed Harris and Benicio Del Toro as cops, Charles Dance as a philandering, domineering husband, and Madeleine Stowe as a femme fatale. ★★ (CC)

*

Sunday Best (dir. Sacha Jenkins, 2025). Otis Williams, founder of the Temptations, speaks of Ed Sullivan as “a doorbell” — someone who opened the door to Black performers so that they could reach national television audiences. The documentary is strong on Sullivan’s early newspaper career, his improbable rise to television fame, and his commitment throughout his career to social justice. We get to see many clips from his Sunday night show: the Beatles, Harry Belafonte, James Brown, Nat “King” Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Presley, Nina Simone, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, and many others. But there’s too much going on, with a faux-Sullivan (AI-generated?) voice speaking his words, performance clips cut short by bits of news footage, and endlessly laudatory commentary, mostly from Belafonte and Smokey Robinson. ★★★ (N)

*

My Oxford Year (dir. Iain Morris, 2025). Anna De La Vega (Sofia Carson), Queens native, English major, Cornell graduate, with a position as a corporate analyst on hold for her at Goldman Sachs, takes a year off to get a master‘s studying Victorian poetry at Oxford (she loves libraries and the smell of old books, she confesses), where she hooks up (for “fun”) with handsome doctoral student Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest), who’s taken over all instruction in Anna‘s (one?) graduate class (which was supposed to have been taught by her scholarly hero(ine), whom she never gets to speak to), and Anna and Jamie’s relationship — surprise — becomes more serious. I thought this movie would be bad — that’s why I proposed that we watch it — but I was still a little staggered by the opening voiceover: “The poet Henry David Thoreau …,” and by the instructor’s directive to find a poem in “the book” that “speaks to you,” and by the presentation of the last lines of “Dover Beach” as a whole poem, and by the trenchant question, “What is Matthew Arnold saying,” and by the presence of an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem (you know, the one with the candle) in a course about Victorian poetry. The storyline is clichés galore — it’s like a Hallmark movie with Buckfast and Tennyson. And if you, too, are wondering, though Anna and Jamie appear to be eating gyros, they are indeed eating kebab, Doner kebab: there, at least, the moviemakers did not make a mistake. ★ (N)

[Yes, Thoreau was a poet, though it’s difficult to think of poet as the way to identify him.]

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