Twelve movies

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

Heat Lightning (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1934). One of the last pre-Code movies, with the distinction of being condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency. From a play by Leon Abrams and George Abbott, it observes the unities of time and place, moving from one morning to the next at a gas station/café in a blazingly hot southwestern desert. But plot goes all over the place: with the two sisters who run the gas station (Aline MacMahon and Ann Dvorak), two sharp-dressed men passing through, two wealthy divorcees, also passing through, and assorted others. Sex, gunplay, gasoline, and water included. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Great Jewel Robber (dir. Peter Godfrey, 1950). Based on the career of Gerard Dennis, who stole from the rich and famous. Eddie Muller’s intro made me think that I was going to see a genteel thief at work. But David Brian’s Dennis is a brute — well, whatever does the job. The most interesting point about this movie is that every character is a double-crosser: it’s a world in which trust is folly. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Blackout (dir. Terence Fisher, 1954). Dane Clark plays Casey Morrow, an American in London, who meets with an extraordinary proposition while in a bar, drunk: a beautiful blonde woman, Phyllis Brunner (Belinda Lee), will pay him £500 to marry her. The next morning Casey finds himself in a strange apartment with blood on his overcoat, and a newspaper headline tells him that Phyllis’s father has been murdered. This confusing story reminded me of The Big Sleep, with one complication leading to another, and no clear indication of how our hero is able to figure everything out. Best moment: Casey tells good old Maggie Doone (Eleanor Summerfield) that he guesses he’s up to the task of playing private eye: “I’ve seen enough movies.” ★★★ (CC)

*

Blackout (dir. Robert S. Baker, 1950). A Londoner, Chris (Maxwell Reed), temporarily blinded in an accident, ends up at a wrong address, finds a dead body on the floor, and is knocked out (not killed) by the still-present killers when they realize that they have not been seen. When Chris regains his sight, he sets out to find whodunit and to whom. This improbable story isn’t helped by Chris’s utter foolhardiness (hint: at least get yourself a gun when you go out hunting for killers). Filmed on location, with good glimpses of mid-century England. ★★ (YT)

*

Eleven P.M. (dir. Richard Maurice, 1928). A writer with an 11:00 p.m. deadline (Louis Perry) is at work on a story when he falls asleep. The movie seems to be the content of a dream in which a street musician (Maurice himself) attempts to protect an orphaned girl. This film would pair well with Cat People, or even with Eraserhead. It’s a truly strange moment in Black American film, in silent film, in film. ★★★ (CC)

*

Blind Spot (dir. Robert Gordon, 1947). Jeffrey Andrews (Chester Morris), an alcoholic writer of psychological novels that don’t sell, comes up with a brilliant plot for a moneymaker — a locked-room murder mystery that he shares with several listeners, including his no-good publisher. When the publisher is found dead in his locked office, Andrews is in a jam: prone to drunken blackouts, he can’t remember his story, who heard him tell it, and whether he committed murder. Good low-budget noir, with a nice reference to The Lost Weekend and, as in the later Sunset Boulevard, the slightly overwrought dialogue and voiceover narration of a “writer”: “After ten years on coffee and donuts, my ego is calloused.” Constance Dowling adds considerable interest to the story as the alluring, New York-accented Evelyn Green, Andrews’s dangerous partner in hiding out from the cops. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Howard Hawks at the Criterion Channel

The Criminal Code (1931). We realized early on that we had seen the remake, Convicted. Here Phillips Holmes is the fine young man (hereafter, the FYM) sent to prison; Walter Huston is the benevolent warden; Constance Cummings is the warden’s daughter, improbably on the premises; and Boris Karloff is the FYM’s feral cellmate, bent on avenging an old wrong. The question that hangs over the story concerns the FYM: will he follow the criminal code or keep to the straight and narrow? Huston is the star, but Karloff steals the movie. ★★★

Only Angels Have Wings (1939). Cary Grant and Jean Arthur star, but I think of it as an ensemble movie in which everyone gets a turn: Richard Barthelmess, Rita Hayworth, Sig Ruman, &c. The setting: the all-in-one world of a small air freight company flying mail through the Andes, with sleeping quarters, restaurant, and bar. It’s a deeply homosocial world of loyalty and selflessness and something close to kinship: The Kid (Thomas Mitchell) calls Geoff Carter (Grant), the company’s manager, Papa (Grant was twelve years younger). Jean Arthur’s traveling singer Bonnie Lee is a complication for Geoff (ditto Rita Hayworth): witness the extraordinary scene in which Bonnie asks Geoff why she can’t love him as The Kid does. ★★★★

*

Pacific 231 (dir. Jean Mitry, 1949). The movie title is the name of a variety of steam locomotive and the title of a composition for orchestra by train-loving composer Arthur Honegger. Jean Mitry turns Honegger’s Pacific 231 into a score for a wild, intense ride. Quick glimpses of wheels, tracks, steam, and countryside, as a train makes its way from a rail yard to a station. Anthony Frewin, assistant to Stanley Kubrick: “Stanley said Pacific 231 was one of the most perfectly edited, if not the most perfectly edited films, he had ever seen.” ★★★★ (YT)

*

Daybreak Express (dir. D.A. Pennebaker, 1953). Pennebaker’s first film, in which Duke Ellington’s 1933 recording “Daybreak Express” (variations on “Tiger Rag”) becomes the soundtrack for a ride on the soon-to-disappear Third Avenue El. A beautiful, exhilarating montage of people, tracks, stations, cityscapes, darkness, and light, and even a good glimpse of a car’s interior, complete with a placard for Winston cigarettes. Restarting the recording midway is a clumsy choice (just make a shorter movie!), and the roller-coaster effect at the end seems at odds with the plainer beauty of everything that precedes it. But still! ★★★★ (CC)

[The interior. Notice too the placards advertising Mounds and Almond Joy (“Indescribably delicious!”) and Pine Bros. cough drops. Click for a larger view.]

*

The Station Agent (dir. Tom McCarthy, 2003). The owner of a model-train shop dies, leaving to his lone employee Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) a plot of land in rural New Jersey on which sits a defunct train station. Fin, a man with dwarfism, resolutely solitary, moves into the station, intent on a life of reading, with occasional walks along the right of way (i.e., railroad tracks) to a convenience store for necessities. But he finds friendships developing, with Joe (Bobby Cannavale), who’s minding a coffee and snack truck for his father, and Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), an eccentric painter and terrible driver who almost runs Fin over, twice. Like Smoke (dir. Wayne Wang, 1995), it’s a movie about chance meetings and the wonders they can bring. ★★★★ (AP)

*

The Perfect Neighbor (dir. Geeta Gandbhir, 2025). A documentary made almost entirely from police body-cam footage. The story (which is known from the movie’s start) is heartbreaking: Susan Lorincz, an older white woman, living alone, calls 911 repeatedly about the neighborhood kids, mostly Black, playing and making noise, allegedly on her property, and that same woman ends up shooting through her own door and killing Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four, who comes to confront Lorincz about her behavior. One police officer can be seen and heard saying the single word “Psycho” to another officer after responding to yet another a 911 call from Lorincz, and it doesn’t take special training to see that she is, in some way or ways, deeply disturbed, devoid of empathy, delusional, narcissistic (“perfect neighbor” is her self-description), with a deep racist streak to boot. But nothing ever came of that officer’s “Psycho,” and if ever there was a story to make the case for bringing mental-health professionals into the work of policing, this movie tells it. ★★★★ (N)

Related reading
All OCA “12 movies” posts (Pinboard)