Twelve movies

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

‌Lumière, Le Cinéma! (dir. Thierry Frémaux, 2024). Originally titled ‌ Lumière, l’aventure continue, it’s a sequel to ‌Lumière!, an earlier collection of films by Auguste and Louis Lumière. This anthology presents 120 short films (fifty seconds or less), with a running commentary by Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Institut Lumière, and music (brilliantly tailored to each film) by Gabriel Fauré. One might think for a moment that we’re back in a world of TikToks, but here the emphasis is mainly on the ordinary: people walking in a city, women leaving a workplace, men riding bicycles and waving their hats, boats in a port, all scenes that are beautifully composed (painterly), in footage that has been lovingly restored. I only wish that the English subtitles were less overwrought: “With Lumière, the Cinematograph will invent and reinvent itself, when it will have explored infinitely its own territories” (huh?). ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Seventh Victim (dir. Mark Robson, 1943). I’ll watch whenever TCM airs it, as it’s one of strangest movies I’ve seen. I’ll let the sentences from my first, second, and third viewings cover for me here. One detail that I didn’t register before this viewing: Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway) is the same psychiatrist who met a gruesome end in Cat People (also a Val Lewton production, released in 1942). A typescript of the screenplay is available at archive.org. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Dillinger (dir. Max Nosseck, 1945). Lawrence Tierney in his first starring role. The movie begins with the promise of a frame story, as John Dillinger’s father tells his son’s story to a theater audience. But that frame is left, uh, hanging, and what develops is a routine story of heists, murders, and speeding cars (the startling exceptions are especially brutal scenes in a tavern and a motor lodge). That this movie was a box-office sensation can only be explained by the strength — make that the brutality — of Tierney’s performance. ★★ (TCM)

*

Ed Wood (dir. Tim Burton, 1994). “Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?”: that’s the question a fictional Orson Welles puts to a star-struck Ed Wood in LA‘s Musso and Frank Grill. This movie (has it been thirty-some years since we rented it on DVD?) is a deliriously funny celebration of individual vision, however idiosyncratic or commercially unsuccessful that vision might be. Johnny Depp plays the outsider auteur of Plan 9 from Outer Space, with optimism and pep, cheerfully announcing to his future wife (Patricia Arquette) that he’s a cross-dresser, lovingly tending to the fading Bela Lugosi (an Oscar-winning performance by Martin Landau), and shooting everything in single takes. With Jeffrey Jones (The Amazing Criswell), Lisa Marie (Vampira), Bill Murray (Bunny Breckinridge), Sarah Jessica Parker (Wood’s girlfriend Dolores Fuller), and George “The Animal” Steele (Tor Johnson). ★★★★ (TCM)

[Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Lisa Marie, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, George “The Animal” Steele, and Michael Satterfield. Click for a larger view.]

*

Mirage (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1965). Ben Mankiewicz remarks that Gregory Peck claimed to have very little recollection of making this movie, and no wonder, because he plays an accountant who appears to be suffering from amnesia, even as assassins sent by a man known as the Major are after him for reasons he cannot understand. Strong overtones of Spellbound, The Manchurian Candidate, and Charade, but the plot here is so murky (not a hint of what’s going on) that it becomes tedious rather than suspenseful. With Diane Baker, George Kennedy, Walter Matthau, and Kevin McCarthy, and a great soundtrack by Quincy Jones. But the real star of the movie is mid-century Manhattan, in vivid black and white. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Bedelia (dir. Lance Comfort, 1946). From a novel by Vera Caspary, best known for Laura. Margaret Lockwood is Bedelia Carrington, a wealthy woman of leisure with several secrets in her past. Her husband Charlie (Ian Hunter) adores her; the fellow painting her portrait (Barry K. Barnes), has his suspicions about her. Like so many noirs and noir-ish movies, this one is a study in psychopathy: Margaret’s consummate ability to charm and manipulate and her utter lack of empathy make for a dark, dark story, much darker than Laura. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Lady of Vengeance (dir. Burt Balaban, 1957). That was no lady, that was my ward, Melissa, who was fooling around with a lousy trombonist before jumping in front of a train and leaving a letter that asked me, her wealthy guardian (Dennis O’Keefe), to kill the man who ruined her life. Of course I agreed, and not having previous experience with murder myself, I enlisted a criminal mastermind and philatelist (Anton Diffring) to hatch a fitting scheme. And as you’ll see, I’m a tricky guy. But you have to believe me when I say that I told the director, “Burt, it’s a B-picture, and that final scene, it’s much too similar to Citizen Kane,” but he just wouldn’t listen, dammit. ★★★ (YT)

*

Of Human Bondage (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1946). Eleanor Parker is impressive as the dissolute Mildred Rogers; Paul Henreid is impressive as a hopeless lover. But are they as good as Bette Davis and Leslie Howard? Alas, no. The movie isn’t helped by Alexis Smith’s disappearance (where’d she go?), nor by Edmund Gwenn’s more than ample screentime. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Postmark for Danger (dir. Guy Green, 1955). British noir. A somewhat bewildering story, with international smugglers and several murders. There’s not much postal system here: if you were expecting a story about, say, a carrier sussing out the doings of a fiendish criminal enterprise from their mail, you’d be disappointed. But who’d really expect that, right? ★★ (TCM)

*

Eyewitness (dir. Muriel Box, 1956). Lucy (Muriel Pavlow) and Jay (Michael Craig) argue, and she walks out into the night, goes to the movies, witnesses a robbery and murder, gets struck by a bus, and spends the rest of this movie in a hospital, heavily bandaged and only sometimes conscious. Meanwhile, murderous Wade (Donald Sinden) and his more decent partner Barney (Nigel Stork) know that Lucy is the only witness to their crimes, and Wade is scheming for a chance to break into the hospital and kill her. Many odd and funny touches in this arch noir, with considerable comedy added by Ada Reeve as a feisty oldster (the nurses think she’s seeing men), and genuine menace added by Donald Sinden. Note to Jay: if you want to make a major household purchase, talk it over with Lucy first. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Social Dilemma (dir. Jeff Orlowski-Yang, 2020). Somewhere in the early aughts, I remarked in a class that attention would be the most valuable commodity of our century, but I did not imagine the ways in which attention would be coerced by forces seeking to erode individual agency at every turn. The focus in this documentary is the algorithm, whatever form it takes, and the ways by which it seeks to entice a user and keep that user clicking. In the age of generative AI for all, The Social Dilemma already feels dated, but its cautionary tales — all coming from people deeply embedded in the tech world — still apply. The warnings here are coming not from Luddites; they’re coming from inside the house, or from people who broke their lease and moved out. ★★★★ (A)

*

The Delinquents (dir. Robert Altman, 1957). Altman’s first full-length solo directing effort. It’s a grim story of teenaged mayhem, with a blond brute and his gang who have it in for a clean-cut fellow and his girl. Brutal fights, enforced whiskey-drinking, and a gas-station robbery, with an intro and outro voiceover to add a veneer of adult seriousness to the proceedings. The cast includes one name that would later be familiar to moviegoers: Tom Laughlin, of the Billy Jack movies, who plays clean-cut Scotty. ★★ (A)

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