[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Amazon Prime, Netflix, YouTube.]
Darcey Bussell: Looking for Fred Astaire (dir. Marion Milne, 2017). Amazon bills this documentary as a retired ballerina’s effort “to learn the true story behind the life and career of Fred Astaire.” In truth, it presents the outlines of Astaire’s life (minus his second marriage) and career, with brief film clips, glimpses of old letters, and illuminating comments about the primacy of sister Adele in the Astaires’ dance partnership and the influence of Black dance on Fred’s art. Sad to say there’s nothing here about Astaire as a singer, though his light casual tenor is (at least to my ear) one of the great American voices. More attention to Astaire’s art and less to Bussell’s fashion-forward onscreen presence would have made for a better documentary. ★★★ (A)
*
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (dir. Griffin Dunne, 2017). Many years ago I was dazzled by the sentences of Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, but I never kept up. Joan Didion seemed to stand at the intersection of writing and celebrity, and I was more interested in writers working on out-of-the-way side streets. This documentary, the work of a nephew, lets us hear and see Didion in archival footage and in old age, scarily thin and living with profound loss (the deaths of her husband and their daughter). And we get to see books and hear about what’s in them, but there’s fairly little about the work of writing here. ★★★ (N)
*
Stolen Identity (dir. Gunther von Fritsch, 1953). A remake of Abenteuer in Wien (dir. Emil E. Reinert, 1952), which I haven’t seen. This English-language version, filmed, like the original, in Vienna (with a different cast), is the sole movie produced by Turhan Bey, an actor known to fans as “the Turkish Delight,” a figure of elegant Orientalism on the screen. The story is highly Hitchcockian: a concert pianist (Francis Lederer, from Pandora’s Box) kills his wife’s (Joan Camden) suspected lover, and a cab driver (Donald Buka) who steals the dead man’s passport finds himself as a suspect in the murder. Surprisingly lively, and it makes me wish that Turhan Bey had produced more movies. ★★★ (YT)
*
Background to Danger (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1943). The director dismissed this film as “a quickie”: set in neutral Turkey, it’s a spy story (Russia vs. Germany) that seems designed to evoke Casablanca. Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are on board, and there’s a beautiful woman on hand (Brenda Marshall), but the story is inane, with little real drama. The biggest problem is George Raft, the movie’s star, as a Humphrey Bogart-like man of mystery. Raft is wooden, as always, whether he’s buying a pack of chewing gum or punching Peter Lorre in the face. ★★ (A)
*
The Rachel Divide (dir. Laura Brownson, 2018). Rachel Dolezal became a figure in the news in 2015 as a woman who, though born to white parents, identified as a Black American. She instantly became the object of derision and satire, but this documentary reveals her as a woman whose painful backstory (true or not) led her to insist on a transracial identity separate from that of her birth parents. And race isn’t the only aspect of identity at stake here: by the end of the documentary, Dolezal has changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo. Something glaringly missing: any broader consideration of transracial identity, especially the question of whether transracial identity is analagous to transgender identity (see the Hypatia controversy). ★★★ (N)
*
Shoot to Kill (dir. William Berke, 1947). Another movie from our household’s annus mirabilis of movies. A district attorney, his secretary, a newspaper reporter, and an escaped criminal are tangled in a murky story until a twist late in the movie makes everything clear. By which point one must ask, does it matter? The screenplay and acting are weak, but there’s some imaginative camerawork by Benjamin Kline, a cinematographer whose name, like the actors’ names, I don’t recognize. ★★ (YT)
*
The Wild Duck (dir. Henri Dafran, 1983). A loose adaptation of Ibsen’s rather heavy-handed play, with Liv Ullmann and Jeremy Irons as partners and parents in a marriage that, though far from perfect, at least works (she, doing the work of their photography business; he, filled with grandiose schemes for an invention and an autobiography). Into this cramped domestic life comes an old friend (Arthur Dignam) with an inconvenient truth that threatens to destroy the marriage. I’d ask, as T.S. Eliot did in “Gerontion,” after such knowledge, what forgiveness? We got onto The Wild Duck while reading Mark Lilla’s Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (2024). ★★★ (YT)
*
Murder in Monaco (dir. Hodges Usry, 2025). This documentary uses fake footage — including fake closed-circuit footage, with no indication that it’s not real — to construct a bewildering account of a billionaire’s murder, only to take it all back at the movie’s end. Here is a Wikipedia article. Here is another. I just saved you seventy-five minutes or so. ★ (N)
*
Mister 880 (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1950). Edmund Gwenn is William “Skipper” Miller, a Brooklyn junkman (modeled on Emerich Juettner) who makes and passes counterfeit dollar bills to buy the necessities of life, never passing more than one bill at a time, and baffling the Secret Service, until they bring in Steve Buchanan (Burt Lancaster). Dorothy McGuire is Ann Winslow, Skipper’s neighbor and a strikingly modern mid-century woman. And speaking of mid-century, this movie is a treat for anyone wanting to see mid-century American material culture — a recreated Automat, a bar, a candy store with the name Chesterfield covered up on the cigarette advertising — it never ends. A bit too much Capraesque sweetness, but still a swell story, and Skipper and Ann live in Boro Park, the Brooklyn neighborhood of my childhood. ★★★★ (YT)
*
Highway Dragnet (dir. Nathan Juran, 1954). Elaine had no memory of this movie, and I didn’t remember it until the dog showed up twenty minutes or so in: it’s that kind of movie. Richard Conte plays a decorated veteran who slugs several cops, takes their guns, and steals a patrol car when he becomes a suspect in a murder (yes, exactly the right course of action) before hitching a ride with an imperious photographer (Joan Bennett) and a sexy model (Wanda Hendrix). Suffice it to say that the movie is no one’s finest hour. As it wore on, I found that things became more interesting when I imagined Joan Bennett as channeling Divine: Bennett’s performance is that mannered. ★★ (YT)
Here are four sentences from a 2021 viewing.
*
Private Number (dir. Roy Del Ruth, 1936). Watch as class distinctions vanish before your eyes, though not without a struggle. Loretta Young is Ellen, an eighteen-year-old in search of a job, which leads her to an estate whose the head of staff (Basil Rathbone) hires her as a maid. He has eyes for her, but then the son of the house (Robert Taylor) comes home from college. A remarkably frank, nearly pre-Code story, and Young, as always, is one of the most expressive faces in movies. ★★★★ (YT)
*
Fremont (dir. Babak Jalali, 2023). Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is a young Afghan woman, a former translator for the U.S. military, now living alone in the Bay Area and working at Handmade Fortune Cookies. Her fortune seems bleak: she’s solitary, unable to sleep, and wracked with guilt about living in the States when other translators and her family are in danger in Afghanistan, and her insomnia leads her to seek help from a therapist who reads to her, in a surprisingly helpful way, from Jack London’s White Fang. “Now is a good time to explore,” says a fortune cookie we see at the story‘s start, and the psychiatrist’s help, along with advice from a restaurant owner and a neighbor, prompts Donya to take a wild chance that might — might — change her life. We found this understated, funny, sad, deeply moving movie by chance, but in a different world, it would have been on every best-pictures list. ★★★★ (A)
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
