Twelve movies

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

Two Seconds (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). The title references the two seconds before brain activity supposedly ends after the switch is thrown on an electric chair. Thus we have John Allen (Edward G. Robinson) reliving the events of his sorrowful life in a movie-long flashback, as all goes wrong because of his marriage to Shirley (Vivienne Osborne), a sharp, faithless operator. The movie is grim in a pre-Code way, but stagy in the extreme (it’s from a play by Elliott Lester). Robinson’s performance is the wildest, most feral acting I’ve seen from him. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Last Year at Marienbad (dir. Alain Resnais, 1961). We watched because the movie is reputed to be influenced by Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel. And I can see some connection. But Bioy Casares’s novel is sly, comic, mysterious, and thought-provoking, and this movie is a mere muddle of pretension with claims to portentousness. A handful of slick television commercials for high-end fragrances would serve as well and leave the viewer plenty of time for a different movie. (A)

*

The Target Shoots First (dir. Christopher Wilcha, 1999). One world of work, at Columbia House, the mail-order outfit that enticed the listener to buy some number of LPs, cassettes, or CDs for a nominal sum (say, a penny). Wilcha, an NYU philosophy graduate, was hired as an assistant product manager after an interview during which he was able to explain Nirvana’s popularity, and he was permitted to carry around his camcorder, with which he recorded all manner of moments at work, funny and serious. Lots of shenanigans (attempting to steam open an executive’s paycheck after it went into the wrong mail slot), but also a serious effort to create more eclectic and appealing monthly catalogues (placing musicians as different as Mississippi John Hurt and the Pixies on the same page). The title suggests that whatever you might do, the consumer has already decided. ★★★★ (YT)

[As Rolling Stone reports, Columbia House is shutting down. There’s still a (sad) website.]

*

Harlan County U.S.A. (dir. Barbara Kopple, 1976). Another world of work, as members of the United Mine Workers of America, with strong support from their wives, go on strike in 1973 in “Bloody Harlan,” a Kentucky county with a long history of union-management conflict and violence. Barbara Kopple made a record of what might be called barbaric capitalism, which spirals into the point-blank murder of a young miner on the picket line. It’s impossible to look at the gun thugs (as a miner’s wife calls them) who serve the interests of the mine operators without thinking of both Klan terror and the the state-sponsored terror now turned on citizens and non-citizens across the United States. I learned after watching that the head of the strikebreakers, Basil (or Bazel) Collins, who pointed a gun at Barbara Kopple and allegedly offered a bounty for her murder, now has a bridge named for him in the city of Harlan. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Youth Run Wild (dir. Mark Robson, 1944). Children, don’t let your parents grow up to work in defense plants: that’s one takeaway from this movie, as unsupervised teenagers find their way into all manner of trouble (truancy, joyriding, stealing tires, frequenting dancehalls), as their parents work, sleep, drink, and play cards. Interesting to see Bonita Granville (Nancy Drew and co-producer of TV’s Lassie ) as a semi-bad girl; interesting to see Kent Smith as an earnest veteran helping kids; interesting too to see Lawrence Tierney as a semi-, very semi-, good guy. But interesting isn’t the same as good, and this movie isn’t very: though it was inspired by a 1943 Look photo essay, Look panned it, and Val Lewton, the movie’s producer, disavowed it. ★★ (YT)

*

State Department: File 649 (dir. Sam Newfield, 1949). Wikipedia calls it film noir. It’s not, nor is it a good movie. Lifeless acting and clumsy dialogue in a story of a Mongolian warlord threatening American Foreign Service staff. One odd reward: the chance to see John Holland, who played Alice Kramden’s boss Tony Amico in The Honeymooners episode “Brother Ralph.” ★ (YT)

*

Vivacious Lady (dir. George Stevens, 1938). It wasn’t until the twenty-six-year-old associate professor of botany (Jimmy Stewart) climbed out the window of his nightclub-singer wife’s (Ginger Rogers) dorm room [sic ] that I realized that we’d seen this movie before — and in 2024, no less. It’s a screwball comedy that made almost no dent in my hard head. But there are at least two reasons to watch: an opening nightclub number, and a brief scene in which Rogers, Beulah Bondi, and James Ellison dance the Big Apple, as college president Charles Coburn watches in shock and loses his monocle. It’s reassuring to understand that when the Murphy bed drops at the movie’s end, the young marrieds will finally have a chance to consummate their no-longer-secret marriage. ★★ (TCM)

[I’ve warmed a little from my first viewing. But still only two stars.]

*

Still of the Night (dir. Robert Benton, 1982). A newly divorced psychiatrist (Roy Scheider) embarks upon an insanely dangerous relationship with a mysterious woman (Meryl Streep) whose murdered (and married) lover was the psychiatrist’s patient. Did she do it? There’s every reason to think so but maybe not to think so — heck, she’s pretty hot. Seven jump scares, Hitchcock tropes galore, and for some reason the smokers all smoke Gauloises. ★★★ (A)

*

Ganz: How I Lost My Beetle (dir. Suzanne Raes, 2019). Josef Ganz (1898–1967) designed tiny cars. One problem: he was a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, forced to flee the country in 1934. Though there seems to still be debate about his contributions to what became the Volkswagen Beetle, similarities between his Standard Superior and the celebrated Beetle seem undeniable. Designer and journalist Paul Schilperoord and Ganz’s descendant Lorenz Schmid uncover the life and work of a lost automobile innovator. ★★★★ (A)

[Much more at the Josef Ganz Archive.]

*

Where’s My Roy Cohn? (dir. Matt Tyrnauer, 2019). A henchman to Joseph McCarthy, a mentor to Roger Stone and the current occupant, a lawyer for Mafiosi, a closeted gay man who fooled no one, who lived with his mother until she died, and who himself died of complications from the AIDS he vehemently denied having: imagine getting your one lifetime and living it as Roy Cohn. The rules upon which Cohn built his career — always attack; admit nothing, deny everything; always claim victory, never admit defeat — are, of course, the principles on which the current occupant founded his adult life. This documentary teems with revealing clips of Cohn and those who knew him. For me, the biggest surprise was the story of Cohn’s relationship (whatever form it took) with G. David Schine and its importance to the Army-McCarthy hearings. ★★★★ (A)

*

The Apprentice (dir. Ali Abbasi, 2024). Teacher and student: Roy Cohn and a young real-estate man from Queens being schooled in Cohn’s rules (see above). Sebastian Stan is convincing as the young man from Queens, awkward, crude, impulsive, violent, utterly lacking in self-awareness. But Jeremy Strong steals the movie as the morally and then physically decrepit Cohn. With Maria Bakalova as a wily but pathetic Ivana and Martin Donovan as the gradually enfeebled Fred. ★★★★ (A)

*

The Social Reckoning (dir. Aaron Sorkin, 2026). Call it Spotlight for big tech, or Algorithms for Dummies — a somewhat heavy-handed story of investigative journalism that assumes an audience as naive about social media as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) was in 2019 when he began investigating Facebook’s efforts to manipulate its users into spending more time on the platform by serving them incendiary content. As Facebook engineer Frances Haugen, Mikey Madison is an adorable nerd who wants to believes that the company is a force for good but agrees to share the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t. As Mark Zuckerberg, Jeremy Strong is uncannily awkward, like a robot working hard to look like a human being. A reference to Frank Capra seals the charge of heavy-handedness, but there are some great scenes: Zuckerberg being coached for a Senate hearing; Zuckerberg standing, frozen, Queeg-like, as he watches the events of January 6, 2021, play out. ★★★ (T)

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