Twelve movies

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

Random Harvest (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1942). A bonkers story of double amnesia, from what must be a bonkers James Hilton novel. Ronald Colman plays an amnesiac veteran, ”John Smith,” who leaves the asylum where he’s confined after WWI, meets and marries a singer, Paula Ridgeway (Greer Garson), suffers an accident that restores his memory of his early (wealthy!) life while wiping out all memory of his marriage, and begins to succumb to the charms of a much younger woman (Susan Peters). Can Paula find her husband and help him recognize her again? Best moments: the creak of the gate, and “Smithy!” ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Mad Doctor (dir. Tim Whelan, 1940). Basil Rathbone as Dr. George Sebastien, a sham psychiatrist and, in off-hours, the suave murderer of a succession of wives. Ralph Morgan and John Howard play a small-town doctor and big-city newspaperman devoted to uncovering the truth about the doctor; Ellen Drew is the fragile personality who falls under Sebastien’s spell. Genuinely eerie, and the most provocative element is the relationship between Sebastien and his assistant/housemate Maurice (Martin Kosleck): an unmistakable queer subtext there. My favorite line: “Possible tragedy — what are you talking about?” ★★★★ (YT)

[Maurice and Dr. Sebastien. Dialogue from another scene, but it fits here: ”You’re like all the other clever ones, clever until they meet a woman, and then they suddenly become fools, and the law gets them, standing still, with a faraway look in their eyes.”]

*

The Thief Collector (dir. Allison Otto, 2022). A documentary about the theft and recovery of a Willem de Kooning painting from an Arizona museum, the retired teachers who stole it, and the antique dealers who restored it to its proper home. I noticed the 2017 news of this painting’s recovery and wrote in a blog post, “The details make the story sound like something for the Coen brothers.” And it turned into a movie after all, one which presents the story’s ever-deepening strangeness with great imagination and wit. To say much more would give too much away. ★★★★ (A)

[A point I have to make: A young relative of the thieves who appears on camera suggests that the title of The Cup and the Lip, a book of stories by one of the thieves, is an odd one for English speakers. But in Yiddish, the relative says, cup refers to the mind; lip, to the mouth: what’s unsaid and what’s said. A much more obvious and likely meaning lies in the adage “There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip,” which goes unmentioned in the movie. To my mind the adage suggests the elements of error and risk that would appeal to the thieves, characterized in the documentary as adrenaline junkies. I wrote to the director about it many weeks ago — no reply.]

*

The Librarians (dir. Kim A. Snyder, 2025). The far-right’s efforts to get its people on local school boards began years ago. This documentary shows the results of such efforts, with school boards authorizing the removal from libraries of books that address LGBTQ issues and race, and school librarians protecting the right to read branded as “groomers” and pedophiles and subjected to death threats from members of their communities. As one Texas librarian says, “Librarians are the firewall.” She first appears in the documentary unnamed and in shadow; she later speaks in her own person as Audrey Wilson-Youngblood, no longer willing to be anonymous. ★★★★ (PBS)

[The Librarians is available from PBS with Passport.]

*

It’s Your Library (Teaching Films, Inc., 1947). See Dick play with a piece of coal as he walks to the library to return a book for his mother. See Dick enter the library, eagerly seize upon a book about boats, dirty up the pages, and be told by a librarian (nicely!) to go wash his hands. See the librarian help Dick find books about airplanes and games. See Dick begin to appreciate the library. ★★ (YT)

*

King of the Newsboys (dir. Bernhard Vorhaus, 1938). Lew Ayres and Helen Mack star in a story of a young man’s rise from ruffian to newsboy to publishing magnate, all after his “girl” leaves him and their Hell’s Kitchen environs to live as the mistress of a gangster until — I’ll stop there. Odd and discontinuous, but with real Depression pathos: dreams of Venice, a $50 watch with a ninety-week payment plan. Watch for Billy Benedict of the Bowery Boys and Horace McMahon, later of television’s Naked City. It’s a Republic picture, so it’ll only take an hour of your time before The Late Show comes on. ★★ (YT)

*

Caterpillar (dir. Liza Madelup, 2023). An overly long documentary about a fifty-year-old biracial man, David Taylor, who travels to India to receive color-changing iris implants from a company called BrightOptical (free, in exchange for publicity), an utterly dubious surgical procedure (its usual cost never made clear) with the potential for disastrous results. It’s all hard to look at — eager clients (one of whom understands almost nothing of what company personnel are telling him in English), company personnel who shut down every complaint when things go wrong — but it’s also hard to look away. The movie’s weakness is its vagueness about David’s life: we learn that his past includes a stepfather with green eyes, abuse, “the streets,” drugs (and that’s about it, the words themselves) and a life in Brooklyn, to which he returns by the movie’s end; in the present he appears sadly deluded, with no clear source of income, but posing for photographs as if he’s a celebrity. I wonder if he’s ever heard of The Bluest Eye. ★★★ (N)

*

Cloak and Dagger (dir. Fritz Lang, 1946). Gary Cooper plays Alvah Jesper, a nuclear physicist working on the Manhattan Project, pressed into government service to subvert Nazi development of an atomic bomb. The story moves from “Midwestern University” to Switzerland to Italy, as Jesper seeks to make contact with Hungarian and Italian physicists (Helene Thimig, Vladimir Sokoloff). Along the way, Jesper falls in love with Gina (Lilli Palmer), a member of the Resistance. Best moment: death by strangulation as Rossini’s “La Danza” plays diegetically. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Beware of Pity (dir. Maurice Elvey, 1946). From Stefan Zweig’s only finished novel. As the Great War approaches, Austro-Hungarian lieutenant Anton Marek (Albert Lieven) meets and begins a friendship with Edith de Kekesfalva (Lilli Palmer), a beautiful baronness crippled from a riding accident. It soon becomes clear to the viewer, though not to Marek, that Edith’s feelings for him far exceed his feelings for her, and before long, he’s an unwitting partner in a relationship he doesn’t even realize was in formation, with complications increasing when the possibility of a cure for Edith’s condition arises. The frame story, with a WWII-era Czech Marek in England telling his story to a young Czech soldier, adds an important commentary on the difference between pity and compassion. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Body and Soul (dir. Robert Rossen, 1947). For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the world championship, and lose his own soul? John Garfield and Lilli Palmer star in a story of money and honor in the world of boxing. Adding value: Abraham Polonsky hard-boiled screenplay, James Wong Howe’s cinematography (the fight scenes look like genuine newsreels), and Hugo Friedhofer’s variations on Johnny Green’s title song. With Hazel Brooks as an ultra-glamorous singer, William Conrad as a sleazy fight promoter, and Canada Lee as a boxer undone by the sport. ★★★★ (YT)

*

City of Joel (dir. Jesse Sweet, 2018). I dislike fundamentalism in all its varieties. Here it’s the fundamentalism of the Satmar variety of Hasidism, whose adherents left Brooklyn and created a village, Kiryas Joel [City of Joel], in the upstate New York town of Monroe, building massive multi-family houses for an ever-growing population and electing officials (particularly one evangelical Christian) to do their bidding when it comes to rezoning. Only a handful of more or less official Satmar representatives speak for the camera, when it might be more interesting to hear from the community members who eye the filmmakers suspiciously or laugh among themselves during zoning meetings (but who would likely never speak on camera). Another weakness: the documentary makes no mention of darker matters in the Satmar community (think hepatitis, sexual abuse, and voter fraud). ★★ (N)

*

The Passing of the Third Floor Back (dir. Berthold Viertel, 1935). A British film that offers the opportunity to see Conrad Veidt as something decidedly other than a Nazi officer: here he plays a faintly glowing nameless man who takes a room in a boarding house and proceeds to work his benevolent influence on his fellow residents. They include a tyrannical landlord, a young maid with a reform-school past, and a older couple who have agreed to marry their daughter off to a craven businessman for financial reasons. Opposing the stranger at every turn is the craven businessman (Frank Cellier), in a story that takes shape as an allegory of good vs. evil, angel vs. devil. Best moments: everyone off on a boat trip. ★★★ (YT)

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