Twelve movies

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

Psyche 59 (dir. Alexander Singer, 1964). Something is rotten in England, in the city and out in the country. The story is about an affluent couple, Alison and Eric (Patricia Neal, Curd Jürgens), Alison’s sister Robin (Samantha Eggar), and family friend Paul (Ian Bannen). Alison suffers from traumatic blindness, and the viewer too remains in the dark until the cause of Alison’s blindness becomes known. The disappointingly goofy ending makes this movie lose a star, but Walter Lassally’s cinematography, with its severe black-and-white compositions and startling closeups, puts the star back. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Bright Victory (dir. Mark Robson, 1951). An unusual movie about a veteran, Larry Nevis (Arthur Kennedy), who lost his sight in the war and is now in a military hospital learning how to manage his new life. Many scenes serve to educate the viewer about how someone without sight learns to navigate the world (did you know that the crook of a cane served to protect the knuckles from sharp edges and hot pipes?). There’s also a love triangle in the works, with one woman back home (Julie Adams) and a far more appealing one on the scene (Peggy Dow). More interestingly, and, alas, more briefly, there’s the incipient friendship between Nevis and another blind vet (James Edwards), a friendship that’s threatened when Nevis tosses off a racial slur, not knowing that his new friend is Black. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Killer’s Kiss (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1955). If Kubrick had never made another film, I think he’d still be remembered for Killer’s Kiss, an extraordinarily atmospheric noir, shot on location in New York City with a budget of $75,000. It’s a story for three players: Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a boxer who’s come to the end of his ring career; Gloria Price (Irene Kane), a dance-hall girl; and Vinnie Rapallo (Frank Silvera), Gloria’s violent boss and lover. The plot isn’t much, but the atmospherics are everything: shabby one-room apartments, a dimly lit dance hall, a balletic flashback, Times Square at night, empty cobblestone streets, a warehouse full of mannequins. I could watch this movie again and again, and there — I just did. ★★★★ (TCM)

[Davey Gordon will soon be fighting for his life.]

*

Champion (dir. Mark Robson, 1949). Midge Kelly (Kirk Douglas) knocks about with his limping brother Connie (Arthur Kennedy), gets in a ring to make a few dollars, gets walloped but shows promise, reluctantly marries a waitress, Emma (Ruth Roman), and enters the fight game for real, with a legit manager, Haley (Paul Stewart). Aside from Connie, Emma, and Haley, duplicity abounds: crooked promoters, a manipulative blonde, a new manager with ties to the underworld, and Midge himself, who’s willing to betray anyone in his climb to a championship fight (Haley will call him a golem). The fight scenes are brutal, and as Elaine points out, Douglas was quite an athlete. Most remarkable scene: Midge dancing with amateur sculptor Palmer Harris (Lola Albright), who finds him sculpture-worthy. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Cold Day in the Park (dir. Robert Altman, 1969). Frances Austen (Sandy Dennis) is a wealthy woman in middle age, living in an enormous (inherited) apartment, her human connections limited to her servants and several markedly older friends (likely also inherited from her parents). Into Frances’s life comes a young man (Michael Burns) whom she invites in when she sees him sitting on a park bench in the rain. What follows is an increasingly desperate one-sided relationship. To say this story is bizarre is an understatement; to say that it’s compelling is also an understatement. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Central Park (dir. John G. Adolfi, 1932). A day and night in the park, with homeless rodeo rider Rick (Wallace), down-and-out show-biz aspirant Dot (Joan Blondell), a kindly cop on the verge of retirement (Guy Kibbee), a lionkeeper who’s escaped from an asylum (John Wray), and a lion that’s let out of its cage. There are also gangsters. This loony picture is full of violent energy, with all of its parts somehow fitting together in the end. And it offers some great glimpses of Central Park and New York. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Pandaemonium (dir. Julien Temple, 2000). Quill pens, muddy roads, green hills, candlelight, laudanum, and fine performances by Linus Roache as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Hannah as William Wordsworth, Samantha Morton as Dorothy Wordsworth, and Emily Woof as Sara Coleridge. Many unintentionally funny lines: “We came here to write poetry to ignite a revolution of the mind, not to canoodle on a hillock.” And: “Xanadu … Xanadu … Xanadu … Xanadu.” Most interesting bit: what the movie does with the man from Porlock. ★★★ (YT)

[Canoodle: the OED has it as U.S. slang, first recorded in 1864.]

*

Smart Girls Don’t Talk (dir. Richard l. Bare, 1948). A series of unfortunate events: hitmen borrows socialite Linda Vickers’s (Virginia Mayo) car for work purposes; heedless, Linda begins an affair with the hit men’s employer, nightclub owner Marty Fain (Bruce Bennett); and Linda’s medical brother “Doc” gets knocked off by Marty’s men. So what’s Linda going to do: keep her mouth shut, or go to the cops? There’s not much here, though it’s stretched to the length of a movie. A fun meta moment: Mayo doing the grumpy just-out-of-bed bit she did as Marie Derry in The Best Years of Our Lives. ★★ (TCM)

*

They All Come Out (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1939). They are prison inmates, and the premise is that since they all come out (what about lifers and those executed?), rehabilitation is an urgent matter. The story focuses on a gang of bank robbers, the most interesting of whom are Joe (Tom Neal) and Kitty (Rita Johnson). A remarkably compassionate and hopeful film, with a panel of suited men assessing each prisoner’s abilities and health and and arranging for proper accommodations, and it’s heady viewing seeing the ill-fated Tom Neal (of Detour and a real-life manslaughter conviction) make good. This was Tourneur’s first feature-length American movie, and the first movie with scenes filmed in federal prisons. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

We Lived Alone (dir. Andrea Kannes, 2014). A short documentary about the singer-songwriter Connie Converse, who never achieved commercial success and disappeared in 1974, leaving behind a trove of home recordings. Family members, an old friend, and people who have recently discovered her music talk about her with deep affection. Converse puts me in mind of the poet David Schubert: both were both tragically ahead of their times, he as a proto-New York School poet in the age of Eliot and Pound, she as a singer-songwriter before that identity was even recognized as a possibility in American popular music. All of Converse’s surviving recordings are available at Bandcamp. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Three Little Words (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1950). Fred Astaire and Red Skelton as songwriters Bert Kalmar (words) and Harry Ruby (music), with Vera-Ellen and Arlene Dahl as their dancing and singing spouses Jessie and Eileen. If the names Kalmar and Ruby don’t register: in addition to the title tune, they wrote “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” “Show Me a Rose,” and “Who’s Sorry Now?” Lots of hokum — songwriters squabble! — and many production numbers, almost all of which are orchestrated to sound nothing like music from the 1920s and ’30s. A surprise: Debbie Reynolds, in her third movie role, as Helen Kane, the human inspiration for Betty Boop. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Cat People (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1942). Probable impossibilities FTW! Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), fashion illustrator in the big city, fears that she is a descendant of her Serbian village’s cat-people and will turn into a panther if stirred by deep passion; thus her marriage to previously happy-go-lucky naval architect Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) must remain unconsummated, with not even a kiss passing between them. Oliver is in Sunset Boulevard territory, torn between the darkness of Irena’s world and the daylight world of his “swell” co-worker Alice Moore (Jane Randolph), who’s in love with him. Meanwhile there’s a wholly human predator lurking in the form of a suave psychiatrist (Tom Conway). ★★★★ (TCM)

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