Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Amazon Prime, Plex, TCM, Vimeo, YouTube.]

The Man Who Found Himself (dir. Lew Landers, 1937). Another The Man Who title from a recent string of movies at TCM. Like The Man Who Played God, it’s the kind of fable one might have heard years ago on a Paul Harvey radio broadcast: a doctor and pilot beset by scandal (John Beal) flees medicine for life as a hobo before taking a job as an airplane mechanic at a medical transport company, where a cheerful nurse (Joan Fontaine) begins to suspect his hidden abilities as a doctor and pilot. When a desperate call for medical help comes, will this fellow still pretend he’s not a doctor, or will he rise to the occasion? With a hobo jungle, a lunch counter serving “coffee and,” and Fontaine’s first starring role. ★★ (TCM)

[About Paul Harvey: when our daughter was a wee pal, we frequented a Chinese restaurant that always had Paul Harvey on the radio on Saturdays at noon. Those lunches and an episode of This American Life are why I know about Paul Harvey.]

*

The Ballad of Wallis Island (dir. James Griffiths, 2025). A two-time lottery winner (Tom Key) living on a Welsh island engages a defunct folk-music duo (Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan) to perform for him. Tensions brew between the performers (one of whom brings along a partner, who is out of the picture for much of the picture) and between the performers and their host, whom I shall dub, yes, Stan. There is, as anyone would suspect, a backstory that explains Stan’s unusual effort. A sweet, gentle, poignant story, but a bit too Hallmarky for me. ★★★ (AP)

*

Bad Words (dir. Jason Bateman, 2013). A loophole in the rules allows forty-year-old Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman) to compete in a regional spelling bee for kids who have not yet graduated from eighth grade. He wins and advances to the national competition, dogged all the while by a reporter (Kathryn Hahn) looking to find out what it’s all about. Guy is a mix of contempt and trickery: he makes the Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm look like lovingkindness itself. With Rohan Chand as Guy’s ten-year-old frenemy and Philip Baker Hall as the king of the bee. ★★★ (AP)

*

Paula (dir. Rudlolph Maté, 1952). Miscarriage, infertility, an auto accident, motor aphasia, and redemption: it all may sound like mere melodrama, but the movie tells a deeply serious, deeply moving story. Loretta Young and Kent Smith star as Paul and John Rogers, an academic couple who can’t conceive. An auto accident brings a young orphan (Tommy Rettig, two years before Lassie) into their lives, and it appears that the three might become a family, but there are complications. Watch Young’s eyes in scene after scene and you’ll see what a great actor she was, and be prepared for your eyes to well up now and then. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Farmer’s Daughter (dir. H.C. Potter, 1947). Loretta Young is the farmer’s daughter, Katrin Holstrom, a Swedish-American nursing student who loses her tuition money to a scammy sign painter and takes up work as a maid in the house of a high-powered political family, with a matriarch at the helm (Ethel Barrymore) and a son (Joseph Cotten) in Congress. As in so many pre-Code movies I’ve seen, love serves to erase class barriers. Things take a Capraesque turn when Katie enters politics and all factions unite to defeat Klannishness. Fine performances by the three principals, and the family’s library probably deserves a star of its own. ★★★ (YT)

[Yes, there’s a catwalk, accessible from the mansion’s second story. Click for a larger library.]

*

Christmas Eve (dir. Stuart Cooper, 1986). We didn’t realize it while watching, but this made-for-TV movie is a loose remake of the 1947 movie Christmas Eve (dir. Edward L. Marin). In her next-to-last performance after two decades in retirement, a luminous Young plays Amanda Kingsley, a wealthy widow who with her loyal butler Maitland (Trevor Howard, in one of his last performances) trudges through snow-covered streets to rescue stray cats and distribute sandwiches, coffee, and cash to homeless men and women. Amanda’s Scrooge-like developer son Andrew (Arthur Hill), estranged from his three children, wants to have his mother declared incompetent. It’s coming on Christmas, and having received some bad news about her health, Amanda is resolved to bring her grandchildren home (with the help of a private investigator) and reunite them with their father, but as I said, no spoilers. ★★★ (YT)

*

Orwell: 2+2=5 (dir. Paoul Peck, 2025). I can’t say that I learned anything new, aside from scattered facts of Orwell’s adult life, but many viewers, especially younger ones, will likely find this documentary a crash course in the practices of twentieth- and twenty-first-century authoritarianism and oppression, from the Great War to Gaza and Ukraine. For those who have read and thought about Orwell, this documentary will serve as a cold reminder: here is the world we live in, and Orwell foresaw and warned against so much of it. I thought while watching that this movie might pass for a Terence Davies effort: Orwell’s words — and only Orwell’s words, no talking heads — as a voiceover (Damian Lewis), with period photographs, news footage, and clips from three screen adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four and from other movies. It’s all artfully composed, but I’d suggest reading Orwell. ★★★ (P)

[An aside: How easy it is to fall into the language of euphemism and obfuscation. In 2022 I heard an announcer at an NPR affiliate refer to Vladimir Putin’s “peacekeeping operations in Ukraine.” You can bet that I called the station.]

[In theaters. For now, Plex is the only source for streaming. It’s a $5.99 rental.]

*

Dark Waters (dir. André de Toth, 1944). This Southern Gothic noir begins with trauma: a U-boat sinks a civilian ship, killing Leslie Calvin’s wealthy parents, leaving Leslie (Merle Oberon) as one of only four survivors. Having lost her parents, she’s taken in by her only living relative, an aunt who’s now living at the family plantation, and slowly, slowly, things get very strange: it’s like Gaslight on the bayou. The creepy atmosphere is intensified by the presence of Elisha Cook Jr. as plantation overseer and Thomas Mitchell, of all people, as a houseguest. And the kindly doctor (Franchot Tone) who’s in love with Leslie doesn’t appear to believe the tale she’s telling him — yikes! ★★★★ (YT)

*

Southside 1–1000 (dir. Boris Ingster, 1950). A semi-documentary story of a Secret Service effort to crack a counterfeiting scheme. In this movie’s favor: a telephone exchange name in its title; a slick trick that gets the counterfeit plates from hand to hand; Los Angeles street scenes, complete with Angels Flight; a throwaway bit in a grocery/liquor store with Argentina Brunetti and Tito Vuolo; Morris Ankrum as a dying counterfeiter who commands every scene he’s in; Andrea King as a hotel manager leading a double life; and a wild conclusion. Not in this movie’s favor: the premise that perfect plates for counterfeiting can be fashioned in a prison cell; Don DeFore as an undercover Secret Service man. Years before Hazel, DeFore is already too much a George Baxter, staid and stuffy, to pass for a big-spending “free-money Joe,” much less a criminal, and his relationship with Andrea King’s bad girl (she falls for him ) stretches credibility, snaps it in two, and grinds the pieces into tiny bits. ★★ (TCM)

*

Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (dir. Kent Jones, 2007). After an early career as a journeyman writer, Val Lewton (1904–1951) entered the film industry as an assistant to David O. Selznick at MGM before heading the horror division at RKO, where, in the 1940s, he produced some extraordinary movies: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim (a John Ashbery favorite), The Ghost Ship, and The Curse of the Cat People, among others. As this documentary makes clear, Lewton movies are rightly understood as exercises not in horror but in terror — and as beautiful dream-like compositions of light and shadow. Lewton himself was indeed in the shadows, drifting from studio to studio, working on one unproduced project after another before his early death, leaving behind not a single film clip or recording of himself. Martin Scorcese, the documentary’s narrator, says that “Movies and the movie business are two different things,” and this effort does justice to a producer who was all about what he called his “poor, simple, lucky little films.” ★★★★ (TCM)

*

New Orleans Uncensored (dir. William Castle, 1955). An odd title for a story of corruption on the docks of New Orleans. Arthur Franz plays a Navy vet working as a longshoreman to finance the purchase of a barge; Beverly Garland (later of My Three Sons ) and Helene Stanton play antithetical characters who look much too much alike, adding unnecessary confusion to an already confusing plot. The best thing about the movie: scenes shot on location, including one at Cafe du Monde. Look for Stacy Harris (of many Dragnet episodes) and Mike Mazurki, familiar faces among the largely unknown. ★★ (YT)

*

Dracula’s Daughter (dir. Lambert Hillyer, 1936). The Transylvanian vampire and the burden of the past: Gloria Holden is Countess Marya Zaleska, a daughter struggling to resist her inborn vampiric desire. The count and Renfield return as corpses in coffins, and Dr. Van Hesling (Edward Van Sloan) is here, though he’s now known as Von Helsing. There’s considerable comedy, too much comedy for my taste, including a callback of the celebrated “I never drink … wine.” Much has been of the lesbian overtones in the countess’s attack on a young woman (Nan Grey): it’s a brief but wildly transgressive scene in the post-Code world. ★★★ (V)

[First sentence with apologies to Walter Jackson Bate.]

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