Greek tragedy and Theater of War

“No matter how many times you see it pulled off, the magic trick is always a surprise: how a text that is hundreds or thousands of years old turns out to be about the thing that’s happening to you, however modern and unprecedented you thought it was”: in The New Yorker, Elif Batuman writes about Greek tragedy and Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War.

There’s a new Theater of War event for Zoom tomorrow: The Oedipus Project UK. I’m going to have to miss this one — too, too much to do.

Related reading
All Theater of War posts

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Hulu, TCM, YouTube.]

Nocturne (dir. Edward L. Marin, 1946). George Raft plays Joe Warne, a LAPD detective doggedly investigating the death of a songwriter: was it really suicide? The movie flies off in many directions: it starts with Laura-like sophistication, moves to the details of police work, visits a nightclub with a pianist on wheels, adds some silly comedy with Joe’s mother and another oldster, throws in some romance and a fistfight, and briefly turns meta when Joe stumbles through a dance lesson (Raft had worked as a professional dancer). Look for Janet Shaw (Louise Finch in Shadow of Doubt) as the dance teacher. And enjoy the glimpses of Los Angeles: a Brown Derby, the Pantages. ★★★ (YT)

*

Promising Young Woman (dir. Emerald Fennell, 2020). Carey Mulligan plays Cassie Thomas, a woman of a thousand faces: a med-school dropout, working in a coffeeshop, living with trauma and rage, seeking revenge. I thought about the Iliad while watching this film: here, as there, exacting revenge takes a very high toll when a loss is unredeemable. It gives little away to say that the shadow of Brett Kavanaugh seems to hang over the movie. Bo Burnham is the standout among the supporting players. ★★★★ (HBO Max)

*

Two by Alfred Hitchcock

Young and Innocent (1937). Delightful early Hitchcock. Derrick De Marney is an accused murderer on the run; Nova Pilbeam (young Betty in The Man Who Knew Too Much) is the police constable’s daughter who runs with him. Echoes of The 39 Steps, and anticipations of Saboteur and North by Northwest. Wonderfully episodic, with the children’s birthday party and the hotel dance as standout moments of strangeness. ★★★★ (CC)

The Paradine Case (1947). London: Gregory Peck is a barrister, Anthony Keane, married to a beautiful woman, Gay (Ann Todd), defending another beautiful woman, Maddalena Anna Paradine (Alida Valli), who is charged with murdering her much older husband. The contrast between Gay and Maddalena anticipates the contrast between Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) and Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Vertigo — and you can already guess that Keane, like Scottie Ferguson, will be going over to the dark side (here represented by a brunette, not a blonde). Can Keane return to the daylight world? Capable acting by all, but the movie feels long and talky, talky and long. ★★★ (YT)

*

Step Down to Terror (dir. Harry Keller, 1958). A low-budget, surprisingly good remake of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). The family dynamics are simpler and only slightly less creepy. Johnny Walters (Charles Drake), serial killer on the run, visits the folks, but there’s no niece in the family: here the relative who suspects something is the killer’s brother’s widow, Helen Walters (Colleen Miller), whom Johnny — eww — finds appealing. There’s nothing here to approach the strength of Thornton Wilder’s screenplay, nothing to intensify the incongruity of a psychokiller in Our Town. But it’s fascinating to see a director take up Gordon McDonnell’s short story “Uncle Charlie” and avoid mere repetition of what Hitchcock made. ★★★ (YT)

*

Too Late for Tears (dir. Byron Haskin, 1949). A story of contingency. After Alan and Jane Palmer (Arthur Kennedy and Lizabeth Scott) make a U-turn to skip out on a party, a fellow motorist throws a bag into their convertible, and Jane insists on keeping what’s in it: $60,000. When the money’s claimant, brutal Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea), comes calling at the Palmer household, Jane’s character comes into clear focus, and a battle of criminal wits begins. With Don DeFore (Mr. B. from Hazel) being enigmatic, and Dead End Kid Billy Halop renting boats. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Strange Victory (dir. Leo Hurwitz, 1948). A post-war semi-documentary that’s disturbingly apt for our time. In the words of one of its narrators: “We live like a man holding his breath against what may happen tomorrow.” Hurwitz cuts from image to image, juxtaposing horrifying war footage with scenes from American life. At home: anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, war talk. Thank you, Criterion Channel, for bringing this neglected filmmaker into view. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Remember the Night (dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1940). My idea of a Christmas film, with sharp wit and much tenderness via a Preston Sturges screenplay. You can’t go home again, at least not happily, as career shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck learns, but you can spend Christmas with your handsome, single prosecutor (Fred MacMurray) and his family. It’s always instructive to see MacMurray as a real actor and not as the pipe-smoking, sweatered zombie of My Three Sons. And Barbara Stanwyck — well, she’s Barbara Stanwyck. ★★★★ (TCM)

Listening to Kenny G (dir. Penny Lane, 2021). Kenny G(orelick) is to music what Thomas Kinkade is to painting: a brand with mass appeal and little substance. The saxophonist presents as both preposterously egomaniacal and charmingly self-effacing: see for instance his idle pronouncement that he might get into writing classical music, so that people will wonder if a piece is by Bach, Beethoven, or G. This well-made documentary is filled with clips from G’s career (gee, he can do circular breathing), lengthy monologues for the camera, and commentary from music critics who explain why G is so awful — and yet, like spoons in Uri Geller’s hands, the critics begin to bend, which I guess is the magic of Kenny G. Now it’s time for HBO to offer documentaries about, oh, say, Albert Ayler, Sidney Bechet, Benny Carter, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Steve Lacy, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Zoot Sims, Lester Young, Ben Webster — but I’m not holding my breath. ★★★★ (HBO Max)

*

Saturday Night Fever (dir. John Badham, 1977). I never once thought about watching, but after learning that one scene takes place a block from my child home, I had to. I loved the Brooklyn-ness of it, especially the coffeeshop conversation between dance partners Tony (John Travolta) and Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), a little like a latter-day Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. Tony’s confidence and cluelessness, the meager rewards of his work (a four-dollar raise), the boiling-over hostilities of his family life, Stephanie’s aspirations (two courses at the New School next semester): it all makes for a poignant story of limited means and long odds. Oh, and there’s also dancing. ★★★★ (H)

*

Park Row (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1952). Newspaper wars in 1880s New York, with the principled editor of an upstart paper (Gene Evans) at war with the unprincipled (yet still attractive to him) owner of an established paper (Mary Welch). The circulation war and the love-hate story are secondary here. This movie’s real appeal is in its depiction of the workings of print — paper, ink, type, and jargon (“printer’s devil,” “hellbox,” “30”). It must be the only movie in history in which Ottmar Mergenthaler’s invention of the Linotype machine is fictionalized into a plot point. ★★★★ (TMC)

*

Original Cast Album: “Company” (dir. D.A. Pennebaker, 1970). It was supposed to be the first of a series of documentaries about the making of albums, but it turned out to be the first and last. The recording session (nearly nineteen hours, according to Criterion) runs into the early morning, and what we see is a model of intense effort and generosity among singers, musicians, the recording engineers, and the composer (Stephen Sondheim, of course). I’m not especially attuned to musical theater, so I found it instructive to see Barbara Barrie, Beth Howland, Dean Jones, and Charles Kimbrough, all of whom I know from movies and television, in the Sondheim world. The highlight is Elaine Stritch’s attempt (at least eight takes) to get “The Ladies Who Lunch” right: weariness, frustration, and then, at a later session, she nails it, and for all time. ★★★★ (CC)

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

Philoctetes and Heracles, yesterday and today

I watched a Theater of War event for Zoom yesterday: readings from Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Women of Trachis by Jesse Eisenberg, Frankie Faison, Frances McDormand, and David Zayas, and commentary from frontline medical providers at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx. Faison and McDormand were especially powerful readers as Philoctetes and Heracles, each of whom suffers unbearable, unallayed pain. Philoctetes’s physical agony, from a snake bite, is compounded by nine years of isolation after he is marooned by his fellow Greeks on their voyage to Troy. His cries of pain and the foul odor from his wound prompted Odysseus to suggest abandoning him. Heracles’s agony results from a centaur’s trick: what Heracles’s wife Deininara believes is a love potion is in truth a centaur’s fatal poison, which sucks the air from Heracles’s lungs and consumes his body. What Philoctetes and Heracles want in their suffering: not to be alone. “Stay with me,” Philoctetes pleads to Achilles’s son Neoptolemus. “You must stay by my side,” says Heracles to his son Hyllus. An event that lies beyond Sophocles’s Women of Trachis: it’s Philoctetes, earlier in his life, who lights the pyre that brings his friend’s suffering to an end.

The sound from Lincoln Medical Center as doctors and nurses spoke was often distorted. But one point that rang out clearly: the immensity of the suffering that the coronavirus may bring — suffering in isolation, suffering for which there’s no cure, suffering that might be difficult for someone on the outside of things to understand. I thought of the hospital photograph of Mark Anthony Urquiza shown on television on Monday night as Kristin Urquiza talked about her father’s life and death. And I heard the words “Stay with me” in a new way.

Related reading
All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard) : Ajax and EMTs : Antigone in Ferguson

[I’ve quoted from Bryan Doerries’s translations of the plays. Theater of War is his creation.]

Theater of War via Zoom

Antigone in Ferguson :

A groundbreaking project that fuses dramatic readings by acclaimed actors of Sophocles’ Antigone with live choral music performed by a diverse choir, from St. Louis, Missouri and New York City culminating in powerful, healing discussions about racialized violence, police brutality, systemic oppression, gender-based violence, health inequality, and social justice.

October 2, 4:00 p.m.–6:30 p.m. and October 17, 5:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m. CDT

*

Theater of War for Frontline Medical Providers :

An innovative project that presents dramatic readings by acclaimed actors of scenes from ancient Greek plays to help nurses, doctors, EMS, first responders, administrators, and other heath care providers engage in healing, constructive discussions about the unique challenges and stressors of the COVID-19 pandemic. This event will use Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Women of Trachis to create a vocabulary for discussing themes such as personal risk, death/dying, grief, deviation from standards of care, abandonment, helplessness, and complex ethical decisions.

October 7, 12:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m. CDT

*

The King Lear Project :

Streamlined readings of scenes from Shakespeare’s King Lear to engage diverse audiences — including older adults, caregivers, and family members — in open, healing, constructive discussions about the challenges of aging, dementia, and caring for friends and loved ones.

October 14, 1:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m. CDT

*

Mothers of the Movement :

A conversation with Gwen Carr and Valerie Bell about their tireless work as Mothers of the Movement.

October 15, 12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m. CDT

Follow the links to register for these free events.

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, Max, TCM, Tubi, Vudu, YouTube.]

Larceny (dir. George Sherman, 1948). Before watching, I promised: no Dan Duryea imitations. Here he’s Silky (lol!), a criminal schemer who devises a con by means of which his better-looking compatriot Rick (John Payne) can scam demure war-widow Deb (Joan Caulfield) for all she’s got. Also on hand: Shelley Winters as Silky’s’s two-timing girlfriend Tory, and Percy Helton providing comic relief as the manager of a YMCA-style residence. A solid and, as far as I can tell, little-known noir. ★★★ (YT)

[I performed no imitations. But I can hear my inner Duryea now: “How ’bout it, baby? Did I keep my word?”]

*

The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2023). The zone is the Interessengebeit, the area around Auschwitz reserved for SS use, where we meet camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), their children, friends, and servants. The film depicts the Hösses’ daily life in a shiny modern house where Hedwig would like to live forever, separated from the camp by nothing more than a wall topped with barbed wire: thus the incongruity of idyllic scenes of gardening and children’s games as gunshots and screams fill the air and smoke rises from crematoria chimneys in the background. Call it the banality of evil, with a table of well-dressed men going over plans for a new kind of crematorium, and Höss as a mid-level white-collar worker explaining to his wife why the higher-ups want to transfer him. In its oblique narrative strategies and startling soundtrack, The Zone of Interest is an impressive film, and its depiction of the banality of evil speaks to our time in countless ways. ★★★★ (M)

*

Violence (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1947). Eddie Muller apologized for this movie when introducing it, and it’s not a distinguished effort. But its post-WWII story is eerily of our time: a difficult economy, a shortage of affordable housing, people who feel they’ve been left behind, and a populist demagogue, True Dawson (Emory Parnell), leader of the United Defenders, channeling the anger of veterans into mob violence while accruing money and power for himself. The noir comes in via Ann Mason (Nancy Coleman), a journalist with a Life-like magazine who infiltrates the Defenders while fending off the advances of organization higher-up Fred Stalk (Sheldon Leonard). When Ann awakens after a car crash and finds a faux-fiancé (Michael O’Shea) pumping her for information, will she remember who she is, or whom she’s pretending to be? ★★ (TCM)

*

A Place among the Dead (dir. Juliet Landau, 2020). A horror movie of sorts, directed by and starring the actor who played Drusilla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Juliet Landau is the daughter of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, and the movie she’s made is an allegory in which her character hunts a serial killer/vampire who is a stand-in for the narcissistic mother and father (shown in family photographs) who have destroyed her spirit. Lots of Blair Witch Project atmosphere, with overwrought acting from Landau and brief comments on the nature of evil from Anne Rice, Joss Whedon, and others. Don’t believe the improbable string of ten-star write-ups at IMDb; this movie has an interesting premise but ends up a mess. ★ (T)

*

Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet, 2023). A strange death — a writer/husband lying in the snow, with a wound on the side of his head — is the ostensible mystery in this drama: did he fall from the top floor or balcony of the family’s chalet, or was he pushed? The movie becomes an anatomy of a marriage and a family, with two writers (Sandra Hüller, Samuel Theis), their son (Milo Machado-Graner), and recriminations and secrets galore. My strong misgiving about the movie is that the explanation of the husband’s death, if we’re meant to accept it, seems to stand independent of what would typically count as evidence: fingerprints? footprints? traces of blood in the chalet? a weapon? Best scene: the long argument. ★★★ (YT)

*

Fallen Leaves (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2023). Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) move from job to job, begin an inarticulate courtship, lose touch, and — somehow — manage to cross paths again and again. Strong overtones of Brief Encounter (there’s a poster for it outside the theater where they see The Dead Don’t Die) and Next Stop Wonderland, with copious vodka (Holappa has a problem), all kinds of karaoke, and a sweet dog named Chaplin. And throughout the story: radio updates on Russia’s war against Ukraine. Most poignant scene: Ansa buys a (second) fork, knife, and plate in preparation for her dinner date. ★★★★ (V)

*

Deep Waters (dir. Henry King, 1948). Life in a Maine fishing village, with all outdoor scenes shot on location. Dana Andrews is lobsterman Hod Stillwell; Jean Peters is social worker Ann Freeman, Hod’s former fiancée, now looking out for the welfare of Donny Mitchell (Dean Stockwell), an orphan whose father and uncle died at sea. You can probably see where the story is headed, and it’s a good story, warmhearted, unpretentious, perhaps even New England neorealist. With Ed Begley, Ann Revere, and Cesar Romero. ★★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature 1950: Peak Noir

Born to Kill (dir. Robert Wise, 1947). Lawrence Tierney is Sam Wild, a paranoid, murderous opportunist; Claire Trevor is Helen Brent, the heiress who finds him irresistible: “You’re strength, excitement, and depravity!” One of the loonier noirs, with Wild romancing both Brent and her foster sister Georgia (Audrey Long). all as Wild’s sidekick and domestic companion of five years, Marty Waterman (Elisha Cook Jr.), stands by his man. Esther Howard steals the movie as a fading alcoholic determined to do right by a dead friend. Marty gets the best line: “You can’t just go around killin’ people whenever the notion strikes you — it’s not feasible.” ★★★★

The House on Telegraph Hill (dir. Robert Wise, 1951). A Bergen-Belsen survivor (Valentina Cortese) takes a dead friend’s identity and steps into what promises to be a life of ease in San Francisco. Of course it’s anything but, because her marriage to her friend’s young son’s guardian (Richard Basehart) is complicated by the presence of a cold governess (Fay Baker) and a house full of danger and mystery. The movie is Gothic noir of a high order, with an air of dread hanging over even a game of catch. Best scene: the juice, with a nod to Hitchcock’s Suspicion. ★★★★

*

From MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series

Patrolling the Ether (dir. Paul Branford, 1944). Social media and its dangers, WWII-style. A man from the Radio Intelligence Division of the Federal Communications Commission (“an FBI of the airwaves”) asks a teenaged ham-radio operator to keep “cruising the spectrum” for anything suspicious. Together they trace a radio signal to a graveyard. The most interest thing about this short might be the convincing transformation from teenager to grown man via a fedora and pinstripes. ★★ (TCM)

*

A Raisin in the Sun (dir. Daniel Petrie, 1961) / A Raisin in the Sun (dir. Kenny Leon, 2008). Familial harmony and conflict, with a three-generation Black family, long-awaited money from a life-insurance payout, and the dream of leaving a South Side Chicago tenement for a house of one’s own. We watched these two adaptations of Lorraine Hansberry’s play on consecutive nights, and there’s no contest. The earlier adaptation has the principals from the Broadway production, with Claudia McNeil as Lena Younger (the matriarch) and Ruby Dee as Ruth Younger (daughter-in-law) far more persuasive than Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald. John Fiedler makes a far better representative of the white property-owners’ group than the ludicrously miscast John Stamos. And as Walter Lee Younger, Lena’s son, Sidney Poitier is a tightly wound, frustrated grown man; Sean Combs seems a laughably truculent youth by comparison. Two more points in favor of 1961: black-and-white cinematography, and a score by Laurence Rosenthal that evokes (at least for me) Porgy and Bess. Color cinematography and treacly music give the 2008 version at times the feel of a Hallmark movie. But I’d like to time-travel 2008’s Sanaa Lathan back into 1961: she brings a lively, caustic wit to the role of Beneatha Younger than Diana Sands seems to lack. ★★★★ (DVD) / ★★★ (TCM)

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

Antigone in Ferguson

I watched a Theater of War event for Zoom last night: Antigone in Ferguson, an adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone with music by Philip Woodmore. Cori Bush, just elected to Congress, introduced the event. The actors included Tracie Thoms (Antigone) and Oscar Isaac (Creon). De-Rance Blaylock and Duane Martin Foster, choir soloists, were teachers of Michael Brown, who was killed by a police offer six years ago yesterday in Ferguson, Missouri. Relatives of other men killed by police spoke after the performance: Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner; Valerie Bell, mother of Sean Bell; Marion Gray-Hopkins, mother of Gary Hopkins Jr.; and Uncle Bobby X, uncle of Oscar Grant. They spoke of the devastation of losing a loved one to police violence, of pain that never goes away, something Sophocles would understand.

I found many overtones of Lee Breuer’s The Gospel at Colonus, with a message of healing and redemption added to Sophoclean tragedy, most notably in a final song, “I’m Covered.” In Sophocles’s play, Antigone covers her brother Polynices’s body with dust, giving him a symbolic burial and thereby defying Creon’s order against burial rites for an enemy of the state. In the final song, there’s a different kind of covering, as the members of the choir proclaim that they are covered in the blood of Jesus. The most striking visual element in the performance: Willie Woodmore (the composer’s father), with enormous headphones and sunglasses, as the blind seer Tiresias.

I was one of forty (or more) people who raised a hand but had no chance to speak in the discussion that followed the performance. I wanted to say something about Creon. He is accusatory, paranoid, misogynist, intent upon demeaning and destroying anyone who challenges his authority, resistant to any plea that he should take a different course of action. He also identifies the state with himself: “So I should rule this country for someone other than myself?” he asks his son. Sound like anyone you know?

Related reading
All OCA Sophocles posts (Pinboard) : Ajax and EMTs

[I’ve quoted from Paul Woodruff’s translation, in Theban Plays (Hackett, 2003).]

Three mistakes

Richard Cohen, writing in The Washington Post, asserts that the “immigrant detention centers” on the southern border are not concentration camps:

The internment centers at the border are bad — granted. People have died in them, some of them children. Sleeping conditions can be harsh, and it was White House policy to separate children from their parents — an unconscionable cruelty so patent that even President Trump backed down. The president himself agreed Sunday that conditions at some centers are “terrible.”

Still, no one is being held for political, ideological or religious reasons. No one is being whipped and made to work until dead from exhaustion. There is no crematorium

— and I’ll stop quoting right there.

Cohen makes three mistakes. One is to insist that a place must match a particular historical instantiation of the concentration camp to be called a concentration camp. A second is to minimize the horror of a present reality by the use of the word still. A third is to use still to introduce the utterly fallacious assertion that “no one is being held for political, ideological or religious reasons.” Of course the people being held on the southern border are being held for political and ideological reasons. They have been conscripted as extras in a theater of cruelty whose purpose is to gratify the inchoate fear and hatred of a racist, xenophobic president’s so-called “base.” The cruelty, as many people have observed, is a feature, not a bug.

The Merriam-Webster definition of concentration camp:

a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.

And the Oxford English Dictionary definition:

a camp in which large numbers of people, esp. political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labour or to await mass execution.

Either definition is a fair description of our twenty-first-century American “detention centers.” If the best Richard Cohen can do is to say that no one is being whipped, no one is being worked to death, he has chosen to see what is not normal as already normal.

A related post
Masha Dessen on “concentration camp”

[And re: the internment of Japanese-Americans, Cohen says, ”Atrocious, but not a concentration camp.”]

Twelve more movies

[No spoilers.]

The Salesman (dir. Asghar Farhadi, 2016). From the director of A Separation (2011), the movie that made me want to see this one. When an apartment building is shaken to its foundations and rendered uninhabitable, two of its tenants, a husband and wife in “the arts” (theater), move to a new building, where their marriage is shaken to its foundations by an assault and its aftermath: the victim’s self-doubt and shame, her partner’s need for revenge. All against a backdrop of Death of a Salesman, whose relevance isn’t always especially clear. A DVD-extra interview with the director helps.

*

Columbus (dir. Kogonada, 2017). In Columbus, Indiana, a town filled with modernist architecture, Jin (John Cho), the son of an dying architectural historian, and Cassandra, or Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a young local, meet and talk and walk and look at buildings, again and again. Their relationship (which begins as they stand on opposite sides of a fence) cuts across barriers of age, culture, and class. The leads are excellent: Cho as a son who professes no interest in architecture and resents the gestures of mourning that will be required of him; Richardson as a young woman obsessed with architecture who sees no way to escape her obligations to her mother and get away to college. The film was too perfect, too pretty for me, with virtually every shot displaying symmetry or pleasing asymmetry. And yes, Jin and Cassandra talk about symmetry and asymmetry. But unlike Elaine, I was able to refrain from checking the time while watching. Columbus has had rave reviews, so consider these sentences a minority report.

*

Más Pedro Almodóvar

What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984). Domestic comedy and tragedy, with three dysfunctional generations in a tiny apartment: a grandmother who keeps her mineral water under lock and key, her cabdriver/forger son Antonio, his amphetamine-addled cleaning-lady wife Gloria, a drug-dealing elder son, and a younger son who’s prostituting himself to men. And Gloria’s next-door best friend Cristal, also a prostitute. This movie felt to me like preparation for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988).

Broken Embraces (2009). A brilliant, richly plotted story of fathers and sons; love, loss, and revenge; and movie-making, informed by the spirits of Audrey Hepburn, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo), and Michael Powell (Peeping Tom). With Penélope Cruz and other Almodóvar regulars. Prerequisite: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I now have three favorite Alomdóvar films: All About My Mother, Volver, and this one.

*

Good Morning, Miss Dove (dir. Henry Koster, 1955). Something like a schoolroom version of It’s a Wonderful Life, with Jennifer Jones as an elementary-school geography teacher, strict, severe, devoted to duty, and somehow loved by her students and townspeople. In the one extended scene of Miss Dove (no first name) at work in her panopticon, she interrupts the “lesson” again and again, stopping to address every transgressor of the rules. What’s really being taught here? Not just the products of the Argentine pampas. I was made to read Frances Gray Patton’s story “The Terrible Miss Dove” in middle school. What was that about?

*

L’Argent (dir. Robert Bresson, 1983). “O money, god incarnate, what wouldn’t we do for you?” Bresson’s last movie, all tans and blues, with money as a means not of exchange but of betrayal. A young man passes a counterfeit bill, and that one act proves to have disastrous consequences in other lives, far removed. Bresson works with extraordinary economy, letting the viewer fill in the implications. From a Tolstoy novella, The Forged Coupon.

*

Deux films avec Isabelle Huppert

Things to Come (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016). Huppert as a philosophy teacher who finds her life — no spoilers — upended. And then — no spoilers — life goes on. I loved this film, which makes intellectual work feel as everyday as any other kind of work. How could I not love a film that begins with a protagonist grading papers while on a family outing? For advanced grown-ups only.

Elle (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 2016). Huppert as the owner of a video-game company, a woman whose life is saturated in violence, sex, and sexual violence. This film is by turns intensely disturbing and strangely funny. It’s like a comedy of musical beds interrupted by scenes of stylized terror, or a whodunit interrupted by scenes of domestic farce. Excellent, but Things to Come is the film I’d choose to see again.

*

Ministry of Fear (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944). Had we seen it before? Yes? No? Maybe? Yes, I think, years ago. Ray Milland plays a man who stops by a village fête and walks away with a cake that was meant for someone else. Trouble follows. An excellent noirish thriller, with a séance, spies, a great scene on a train, and strong overtones of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. This film makes conspicuous use of doors — one after another, each opening onto new trouble. My favorite moments: the man crumbling cake, Martha Penteel’s doorbell, light shining through a bullet hole.

*

The Outrageous Sophie Tucker (dir. William Gazecki, 2014). Sometimes a movie appears to rise of its own accord to the top of the Netflix queue. I became idly curious about Sophie Tucker after seeing her in
an Ed Sullivan clip that evoked a lost world of stage performance. But Tucker, singer, entertainer, the Last of the Red Hot Mamas, was made, really, for these times. She was frankly sexual and frankly fat, a pioneer of commercial endorsements (in English and Yiddish), and an early social networker, collecting names and addresses in her travels and sending out cards when she was about to play a city. This documentary has too little Tucker, too many talking heads, and several awkward moments of digital trickery to put old photographs into motion. (Why?) Fortunately, YouTube is full of Tucker herself.

*

Ninotchka (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1939). “Garbo laughs,” as the movie poster promises. Ninotchka, Nina Ivanovna Yakushova (Greta Garbo), grim, prim Soviet envoy, comes to Paris to check on the doings of three comrades who have been sent to reclaim jewels from a Russian duchess. Ninotchka proceeds to fall in love with a Parisian count (Melvyn Douglas). The famous Lubitsch touch might now seem like the stuff of a hundred rom-coms since. But those pictures don’t have screenplays by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder (and Walter Reisch). “You’re the most improbable creature I’ve ever met in my life, Ninotchka . . . Ninotchka.” “You repeat yourself.” And when Ninotchka asks for raw beets and carrots: “Madame, this is a restaurant, not a meadow.”

*

Frantz (dir. François Ozon 2016). The vaguely Zweig-like premise made me curious about this film: a young woman who has lost her fiancé in the Great War sees an unknown young man leaving flowers at her fiancé’s grave. There's nothing more I can say about the story without giving something away. I can say that Frantz is a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby (1932), an atypical Lubitsch film (which I first learned of from a DVD-extra interview with Ozon). Frantz is a delight to the eye, filmed in rich black and white with occasional elements of color. Paula Beer and Pierre Niney offer understated, deeply moving performances. If I were running the Academy Awards I'd have chosen Frantz (not The Salesman) as the best foreign-language film of 2016.

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Eleven movies, one season

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, PBS, TCM, YouTube.]

From the Criterion Channel’s Terence Davies / A Retrospective

A trilogy
Children (1976). Snapshots of the artist as a boy and a young man. The boy, Robert Tucker (Phillip Mawdsley), a Davies alter-ego, is small, gay, diffident, alienated, a silent observer and the target of bullies. His home life is made miserable by a tyrannical father, soon to die. The boy become man (Robin Hooper) sits, thinks, collects photos of professional wrestlers, and takes pills for depression. These sentences do nothing to capture Davies’s ability to weave past and present into a cloak of sorrow and torment. ★★★★

Madonna and Child (1980). An older Robert Tucker (Terry O’Sullivan) lives with and cares for his mother (Sheila Raynor), works in an office, eats lunch alone, sneaks out at night for furtive meetings with men, and goes to confession. There is no plot unfolding here, only an arrangement of brief, sometimes cryptic scenes. Curious: such movies always seem to me much longer than they are (this one is barely twenty-seven minutes). I think that this trilogy must have influenced Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory: the shower scene in Children and the scene in this film of Robert sitting with his mother as she drinks cocoa seem to me likely points of connection. ★★★★

Death and Transfiguration (1983). “Oh, Mum, what would I do without you?” The death of his mother leaves Robert Tucker (Terry O’Sullivan) bereft. But we see him here also as a boy (Iain Munro) and as an old man, dying in hospital. Startling to me, and no doubt meant to be startling: the old Robert, death rattle and all, is played by Wilfrid Brambell, the “clean old man” (Paul’s grandfather) of A Hard Day’s Night. ★★★★

[I wonder if this final part of the trilogy influenced the Frasier episode “Rooms with a View,” which shifts unpredictably between present, past, and future in a hospital.]

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). Another autobiographical film, with glimpses of a family’s life in Liverpool in WWII and after: a brutal father (Pete Postelthwaite), a bullied mother (Freda Dowie), two daughters (Lorraine Ashbourne, Angela Walsh), and a son (Dean Williams). It’s painful to see the daughters choosing husbands who carry the tradition of domestic violence into the next generation. It’s painful to see the son weeping after his wedding (we’re invited to wonder why). Amid all the pain of life, there’s music, in the form of countless popular favorites sung, sometimes as solos, sometimes all together, in parlors and pubs: “They tried to sell us egg foo yung!” ★★★★

*

Dial Red 0 (dir. Daniel B. Ullman, 1955). A veteran escapes from a psychiatric hospital to confront his wife about her decision to divorce him. When she’s murdered, he becomes the main suspect. Improbable but surprisingly good. The only actor I recognized in the cast: Jack Kruschen, the helpful Dr. Dreyfuss from The Apartment. ★★★ (YT)

*

Fear No More (dir. Bernard Wiesen, 1961). Overtones of The Lady Vanishes, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, with a scheme to frame loyal secretary Sharon Carlin (Mala Powers) for a murder on a train. As Elaine observed, this movie also looks forward to Carnival of Souls, with a young woman caught in an unintelligible nightmarish world. Jacques Bergerac (Gigi) is Sharon’s sidekick; John Harding is a sleek villain. Strange and scary. ★★★ (YT)

*

Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road (dir. Brent Wilson, 2021). There’s little here that will surprise anyone knowledgeable about Brian Wilson and his music: we see Brian riding in a car driven by journalist Jason Fine (with whom he is said to feel comfortable), giving short, often familiar answers to leading questions (e.g., declaring that the next big project will be a rock ’n’ roll album, something Brian has been talking about for many years). A series of musical personalities extol the goodness of Brian’s music, heartfelt (the late Taylor Hawkins) or blathering (Don Was, likening to keyboard fingerings of “California Girls” to Mozart’s string quartets). The most affecting moment: Brian silently taking in the news that one-time Beach Boys manager and occasional lyricist Jack Rieley died in 2015. My main takeaway from this documentary: just how difficult it must be to be Brian Wilson, and to persist. ★★★ (PBS)

[A much better look at BW: Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times (dir. Don Was (!), 1995).]

*

The Last Picture Show (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1971). As it began, I said aloud, “It’s just like _______”: a nearby town where there’s no longer any there. In 1950s Anarene, Texas, people pair off in various partnerships because, face it, there’s not much else to do. A great, bleak, funny film about what it means to be of — and stuck in — a place, with echoes of Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, and Cybill Shepherd. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Illegal Entry (dir. Frederick De Cordova, 1949). Crossing the border, yes, but by plane, and that’s where Howard Duff comes in, as Bert Powers, an unemployed pilot working undercover to crack a smuggling outfit. Paul Stewart is an arrogant villain; Märta Torén is a cafe owner whose life is complicated. Brief appearances by official-looking men and brief voiceovers add a semi-documentary veneer. A so-so movie that would be more enjoyable in a print that would show off William H. Daniels’s cinematography. ★★ (YT)

*

Hacks (created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky, 2022). I just read the sentences that I wrote about the first season, and I think they offer a fair description of this second season. There’s more attention given to the lives of the secondary characters, and genuinely funny non-cringeworthy material as Deborah Vance’s (Jean Smart) new stand-up set takes shape. Vance’s relationship with her young writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder) continues to be a real-life theater of cruelty. Fun one-off appearances by and Susie Essman and Harriet Sansom Harris, and a downright scary appearance by what looks like an animatronic model of Wayne Newton. ★★★★ (HBO Max)

*

Thieves’ Highway (dir. Jules Dassin, 1949). Richard Conte is Nick Garcos, truckdriver and son of a truckdriver, looking to get even with Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), the crooked produce dealer whose schemes left Nick’s father without his legs. A great cast, with Valentina Cortese as a sometimes trustworthy prostitute, Millard Mitchell as a sometimes trustworthy trucker, and Jack Oakie and Joseph Pevney as comic relief. It’s the only film I’ve ever seen that I’ve imagined as a post-war European film with subtitles: does that make it American neo-realism? The only weak point is the ending, a little too moralizing, a little too pat. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

How They Got Over: Gospel Quartets and the Road to Rock ’n’ Roll (dir. Robert Clem, 2018). Getting over: moving an audience. This documentary will move even the most secular viewer to something like religious ecstasy. Brief bits of knowledgeable historical commentary, longer comments from singers themselves, and numerous archival performances, many of them complete (thank you, director, for your good judgment). With performances the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Blind Boys of Mississippi, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and more. ★★★★ (TCM)


[A performance that appears in the film.]

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Aeschylus and criminal justice

The New York Times reports on Theater of Law, which brings Aeschylus’s The Eumenides (or The Furies) to audiences concerned with fairness in the American criminal-justice system, “particularly,” the Times notes, “as mandatory minimum sentencing makes a comeback under Attorney General Jeff Sessions.” Theater of Law is a collaboration between New York University’s Forum on Law, Culture and Society and Theater of War.

It has to be said: as ancient Greek and Roman texts become increasingly peripheral to undergraduate English studies, the world beyond academia continues to find such texts remarkably relevant.

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[A question that I hope would arise in any consideration of justice and The Eumenides: what about Iphigenia?]

Theater of War, tomorrow

A Theater of War event for frontline medical providers:

This event will use Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Women of Trachis to create a vocabulary for discussing themes such as personal risk, death/dying, grief, deviation from standards of care, abandonment, helplessness, and complex ethical decisions, the project aims to foster connection, community, moral resilience, and positive action. The project aims to foster connection, community, moral resilience, and positive action.

It’s a Zoom event, free, open to the public, scheduled for this Wednesday, August 19, 12:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m. EDT. Reading from the plays: Jesse Eisenberg, Frankie Faison, Frances McDormand, and David Zayas. Register here.

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One series, eleven movies

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

Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals (dir. Sharon Liese, 2023). “I was born and raised in a strict religious environment, or as most people would call it, a cult”: so says one interviewee in this documentary series. Women who were raised in Independent Fundamental Baptist households speak their piece: about patriarchy and pedophilia, about preachers with the power of mini-gods, about schools (so called) that are, in effect, prisons, and about the effort to speak out and get justice. Given one woman’s account of languishing in an isolation room and wondering why God would let that happen to her, I would have liked to hear these women speak about their present religious belief or lack thereof — it seems an urgent matter to address. Harrowing stuff, and there are many reasons to proceed with caution, or not at all. ★★★ (M)

*

Moonstruck (dir. Norman Jewison, 1987). Two days and nights in Brooklyn Heights, as the moon gets in everybody’s eyes. At the center of the story, the Castorinis: a father (Vincent Gardenia) having an affair, a mother (Olympia Dukakis) sensing that he is, a grandfather (Feodor Chaliapin Jr., son of the great bass) devoted to his dogs, and a daughter, Loretta (Cher), who’s about to marry a diffident yet boorish fellow, Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello). And then there’s Johnny’s estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage), whom Johnny asks Loretta to invite to the wedding — and heck, everyone knows this movie already, right? Wonderful Italian-American stuff, never piled on too thick. ★★★★ (T)

*

Underworld U.S.A. (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1961). A great late noir, with Cliff Robertson as Tolly Devlin, who at fourteen sees unknown gangsters beat his father to death, continues in his own life of crime, and now, in his thirties, is prepared take revenge. Economical, fast-paced storytelling at first, but things get bogged down later with endless scheming. Standouts in the supporting cast: Beatrice Kay as a surrogate mom, Robert Emhardt as a crime boss with a sun lamp, and Dolores Dorn as Cuddles, a low-level drug runner who dreams of a new life with Tolly. I love the bare and utterly unrealistic streetscapes: watching the action, I know that it’s taking place in the movies. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Window (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). From a story by Cornell Woolrich. I could watch this movie again and again, for its tenement apartments, narrow staircases, fire escapes, and its sense of the city as a secret maze best navigated by children. It’s a fable, a cautionary tale about a boy (Bobby Driscoll) given to making up stories, and who finds his parents and the police skeptical when he announces that he’s just seen someone murdered. It’s beyond sad that Driscoll would be found dead at the age of thirty-one in an abandoned building — the very setting for much of the action here. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The City of the Dead (dir. John Llewellyn Moxey, 1960). I found it in a list of great B-movies. Perhaps not great, but it teems with atmosphere and unease. The premise: a college professor (Christopher Lee, yikes) directs a diligent college student (Nan Barlow) to a Massachusetts village to further her research on witchcraft in colonial America — a village that appears to be made of fog, gravestones, and strange voices. If you admire Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), you’ll likely admire this movie, which might be one of Harvey’s influences. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Bad Education (dir. Cory Finley, 2019). Based on the true story of Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman), a school superintendent who with his assistant Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) defrauded a high-achieving Long Island district of millions. That’s no spoiler: the real surprises here come in the way that the truth, with all its complications, emerges, as Rachel Bhargava, a student-reporter for the school paper (Geraldine Viswanathan), begins to ask awkward questions. (Here is Rebekah Rombom, the real-life model for the student-reporter, on her role in breaking the news of the scandal (gift link).) My favorite moments: the visit to Park Avenue, the call to the “consulting firm.” ★★★★ (M)

*

So Well Remembered (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1947). It feels like two movies, both taking place as the war in Europe comes to an end, and neither to be missed. One is the story of a crusading newspaper editor and former member of Parliament (John Mills) who looks back on his life in journalism and public affairs; the other, the story of a man (John Mills) who looks back on the damage wrought across three generations by an ambitious heiress (Martha Scott). The political and the personal merge in unexpected ways in this movie, long believed lost, and recovered by a member of the Macc Lads, a punk band from Macclesfield, England, where the movie’s exteriors were shot. With Trevor Howard as an alcoholic doctor and Richard Carlson as an RAF pilot. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Dangerous (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1935). “I’m bad for people,” says Joyce Heath (Bette Davis), once a icon of the American theater (modeled on Jeanne Engels), now a shambles of an alcoholic who’s convinced that she’s a jinx who brings harm to anyone she comes close to. Aiming to bring her back to stardom is Don Bellows (Franchot Tone), a suave architect who renounced life as a banker after seeing Heath on the stage. Their relationship takes two wild turns late in the movie (Elaine called them both), but the story then speeds to a sudden, ultra-sappy resolution. Great performances (Davis won an Oscar), clichéd script, and it’s fun to wonder what this movie might have been before the Code. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Black Friday (dir. Arthur Lubin, 1940). The two cultures, the humanities and the sciences: when gangster Red Cannon (Stanley Ridges) and courtly old professor of English George Kingsley (Stanley Ridges) are the victims of a drive-by shooting, Dr. Ernest Sovac (Boris Karloff), Kingsley’s best friend, works a miracle by saving Kingsley’s life with a transplant of the gangster’s brain. No wonder the revived professor occasionally morphs into Red, losing his pince-nez and acquiring slicked-down hair and a chalk stripe suit. What’s odder: even though he now has Red’s brain, the professor can still recite swaths of English poetry. Bela Lugosi plays a gangster, but the real star of the movie is the fellow who gets third billing: Stanley Ridges, who really seems to be two actors. ★★★ (YT)

*

A Matter of Life and Death (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946). A deeply strange and deeply moving story that begins with an RAF pilot, Peter Carter (David Niven), at the controls of a burning plane, talking with surnameless radio operator June (Kim Hunter), giving her some last words to convey to his mother and sisters. Peter, it appears, has been scheduled to die, but he doesn’t, due to an error in the workings of an undefined great beyond, and still alive, he promptly meets up with and falls in love with June. When a representative of the beyond demands that Peter come along so that the books remain properly balanced, a celestial trial begins, with Peter and June’s future in the balance. Extraordinary imagination, extraordinary celestial set design, and, in the aftermath of World War II, extraordinary pathos in the scenes of all those service members making their way into the world beyond. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1956). I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jane Russell in a movie, and I’m happy to know from this one that she could act. Here she plays Mississippi-born Mamie, who we’re meant to understand is a sex worker, forced by the police to leave San Francisco, determined to make a new life in Honolulu, where she’s hired as a hostess at a dance hall (with a hallway of private rooms behind a curtain). Mamie’s life is complicated by a romance with a serviceman and writer (Richard Egan) who’s determined to take her away from the life she’s leading. The dance hall’s proprietor, Bertha Parchman (Agnes Moorehead) — named for the prison farm? — has other ideas. ★★★★ (CC)

*

American Fiction (dir. Cord Jefferson, 2023). Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a Black American writer and professor who who draws upon ancient materials (The Frogs, The Persians) for his novels, and he’d like those novels to be shelved in the Fiction section of the bookstore, not in African-American Studies. With a mother (Leslie Uggams) sinking into dementia and needing memory care, Monk hits upon a scheme to make some money: like Jim Trueblood in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, he will give a white audience what it wants: a story of dysfunction, sorrow, and violence, presented to a publisher as the work of a fugitive ex-con writing under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. And the white folks love it, with predictable and unpredictable results. I loved this movie for its cutting comedy and its depiction of a family both whole and scarred — and now I need to read Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. ★★★★ (V)

[I take back what I wrote about The Holdovers: I now think that American Fiction might be the best new movie I see all year. Here is the bookstore scene, filmed in what I immediately recognized as Brookline Booksmith, posing as a chain store.]

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Eleven movies, one mini-series

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Fandango, Max, TCM, Tubi, YouTube.]

All My Sons (dir. Irving Reis, 1948). From the Arthur Miller play. Wartime manufacturer Joe Keller (Edward G. Robinson) has let his business partner take the rap and go to prison for okaying defective plane parts, parts that led to the deaths of twenty-one pilots. That revelation, withheld until late in the story, is meant to be a surprise, but it isn’t, because without it, the story would be pointless. Robinson and Burt Lancaster (as Joe’s son!) do well, but the story is contrived, and the production is painfully stagy. ★★ (TCM)

*

A Hatful of Rain (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1957). From the Michael Gazzo play. A Korean war vet (Don Murray) struggles to hide his morphine addiction from his wife (Eva Marie Saint) and father (Lloyd Nolan) as he’s repeatedly saved from his dealer’s vengeance by his sad-sack brother (Anthony Franciosa). Saint, as a neglected partner who’s almost ready to quit, is the most persuasive of the principals; Murray is plausible as an addict almost ready to commit robbery to fund a fix; Franciosa and Nolan are loud in a way that suits a stage, not a screen. As the dealer and his henchman, Henry Silva and William Hickey are chilling. ★★★ (TCM)

*

A Touch of Love, aka Thank You All Very Much (dir. Waris Hussein, 1969). Rosamond Stacey (Sandy Dennis), a London doctoral student, is a magnet for men but avoids relationships — she’s sworn off men, she tells a friend. And then she finds that she’s pregnant. A deeply bittersweet story, with an actor whose expressive face was made for it: Dennis’s smile never seems far from tears. WIth Ian McKellen in his first film appearance. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Emile (dir. Carl Bessai, 2003). Ian McKellen stars as a celebrated academic returning to his native Canada to receive an honorary degree. There he attempts to establish some relationship with his sole surviving family members, a niece, Nadia (Deborah Kara Unger), and great-niece, Maria (Theo Crane). An understated, highly Proustian story, as Emile confronts things done and not done in his earlier life, with many matters left to the viewer to notice and figure out. Try to count the clocks. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Narrow Margin (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1952). Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor star in a suspenseful story with a simple premise: a police detective is hiding and protecting a mob boss’s widow on a train from Chicago to Los Angeles, where she will name names at a trial. Two thugs looking to prevent her from testifying are also on the train. A long game of cat and mouse ensues. One of the great train movies, and I cannot understand why it hasn’t already shown up in these pages. ★★★★ (F)

*

Trio (dir. Ken Annakin and Harold French, 1950). I’m not sure about W. Somerset Maugham’s ability as a novelist (I’ve never read him), but he was certainly a fine storymaker. “The Verger” is an O. Henry-like tale of an illiterate man’s (James Hayter) surprising good fortune. In “Mr. Know-All,” a jewelry dealer (Nigel Patrick) swallows his pride and tells a lie to preserve a relationship. “Sanatorium,” the longest of these stories, dwells on the lives of tuberculosis patients, with special attention to two (Michael Rennie and Jean Simmons) who fall in love. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Teen Torture, Inc. (dir. Tara Malone, 2024). A thoughtful three-part documentary about the “troubled teens” industry — the multi-billion-dollar array of residential facilities where young people (as young as ten), having been separated from the families and communities, are subject to various forms of psychological, physical, and, sometimes, sexual abuse. These facilities, often unregulated due to religious exemptions, are schools in name only: not one of the ex-inmates interviewed mentions a book or a classroom. Perhaps the most compelling story: a young woman who hid extra underwear under the insoles of her shoes when she attempted an escape. Two well-known faces in this documentary: the television personality Phil McGraw, who profited mightily from his relationship with one of these facilities, and Mitt Romney, co-founder of Bain Capital, a prominent firm in the industry. ★★★★ (M)

*

Murder Most Foul (dir. George Pollock, 1964). Loosely based on an Agatha Christie novel, it replaces Hercule Poirot with Miss Jane Marple (Margaret Rutherford), here the lone holdout on a jury. Ever skeptical, she begins her own investigation of the murder case, joining an amateur theater company to do so. Two more murders follow. DNA analysis of this movie suggests that it’s a not-distant ancestor of Murder, She Wrote: amateur female investigator, male sidekick (played by Rutherford’s husband Stringer Davis), clues galore, suspects galore, investigator in danger, touches of whimsy here and there. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Luzhin Defense (dir. Marleen Gorris, 2000). From the Nabokov novel. John Turturro is Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, a shabby chess master covered in cigarette ashes and sweat. Arriving in an Italian city to play a championship match, he meets and immediately falls for Natalia Katkov (Emily Watson), a wealthy woman who also somehow falls for him. Their relationship and the evil doings of Luzhin’s former tutor Valentinov (Stuart Wilson) form the stuff of the movie, which spreads itself thin trying to be a chess story (with multiple chess errors), a love story, a study of an obsessive mind, and a tour of opulent early-twentieth-century houses. ★★ (TCM)

*

Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird (dir. Steven-Charles Jaffe, 2013). The cartoonist Gahan Wilson was indeed born dead and brought to life by a persevering doctor, but there’s nothing particularly weird here: this documentary shows Wilson to be a hardworking artist, though I wish there were more about the artist, either talking about his art or doing the work. Instead we get brief commentaries from an array of artists and celebrity fans. My favorite scene: cartoonists having lunch on the day they come to Manhattan to pitch cartoons to Bob Mankoff, then comics editor at The New Yorker. My least favorite scene: cartoonists showing their work to Bob Mankoff, which is like watching students fail an oral exam. ★★ (CC)

*

Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy‌ (dir. Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones, 2024). A documentary urgently worth watching. I’ve written about it in a previous post. All I’ll add here is that every reference to a Democratic candidate as “demonic” or “evil” is wholly literal for some Trump voters. And every reference to a coming civil war in wholly literal too. ★★★★ (T)

*

The Commandant’s Shadow (dir. Daniela Volker, 2024). A reckoning with the past: in this documentary we meet Hans-Jürgen Höss, the son of Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant of Auschwitz, whose family life is dramatized in The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2023). We also meet Hans’s sister Brigitte (still given largely to rationalizations and denials about her father’s actions) and Hans’s son Kai, a minister perhaps more tormented by the past than his father. The documentary reaches a high point when Hans (who early on says “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz”) and Kai visit Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of Auschwitz, and her daughter Maya. Anita: “It’s very important to talk about these things.” ★★★★ (M)

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Twelve movies

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

Somewhere in the Night (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946). I’ve seen it once before, but I’d forgotten how good it is. The plot is confusing (how, for instance, does amnesiac George Taylor (John Hodiak) know to go to a train station locker?), but as in, say, The Big Sleep, it doesn’t matter. There’s a strong Hitchcock element (The 39 Steps, Saboteur), with a man (Hodiak) and a woman, nightclub singer Christy Smith (Nancy Guild), thrown together by circumstance to solve a mystery that takes them into one odd setting after another. And there’s just a dash of The Maltese Falcon — wait for it. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Stranger (dir. Orson Welles, 1946). A New England town, a professor, a past making itself present: The Stranger is for me the most Nabokovian of movies (I’m thinking of Pale Fire). Edward G. Robinson is Mr. Wilson, a hunter of war criminals; Orson Welles is Charles Rankin, a history professor (that’s what the boys call him) at a private school; Loretta Young is Mary Longstreet, the professor’s desperately loyal fiancée. Smaller parts: Billy House as a self-satisfied druggist; Konstantin Shayne as Konrad Meinike, a figure from the past, announcing, in a brilliant bit of misdirection, that he brings a message from “the most high.” My movie eyes must be strengthening: for the first time I noticed Erskine Sanford (from Citizen Kane) in a brief appearance as a party guest. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Mystery of Marie Roget (dir. Phil Rosen, 1942). Sisters (Maria Montez and Nell O’Day), a grandmother (Maria Ouspenkaya), a swain (Edward Norris), the detective Dupin (Patric Knowles), and a prefect of police (Lloyd Corrigan). An adaptation of the Poe story, set in 1889, with characters who say things like “And get this.” But like potato chips and pretzels, this movie makes for a pleasant snack. Corrigan and Ouspenskaya are the only memorable members of the cast. ★★ (YT)

*

The Silent Partner (dir. Daryl Duke, 1978). Watching (mostly) movies from the 1940s and ’50s, one forgets about the possibilities of graphic violence and frontal nudity. They’re both here, in the story of a meek bank teller (Elliott Gould), a bank robber (Christopher Plummer), and schemes galore. Céline Lomez and Susannah York are on hand to add complications, both scheme-related and and non-. And handwriting plays a crucial role: who could ask for anything more? ★★★★ (CC)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Hollywood Crack-Up: The Decade American Cinema Lost Its Mind

Lilith (dir. Robert Rosen, 1964). Vincent (Warren Beatty), a young veteran adrift, takes a job in occupational therapy at a private mental institution, where his main occupation becomes an affair with Lilith (Jean Seberg), who might be called a schizoid pixie dream girl: beautiful, artistic, elusive, sexually voracious. Says Lilith of herself: “She wants to leave the mark of her desire on every living creature in the world.” The nature of desire — both Vincent’s and Lilith’s — emerges in all its darkness as the story develops. The most disturbing scene: Lilith whispering. ★★★★

Pressure Point (dir. Hubert Cornfield, 1962). One long flashback, as a Black prison psychiatrist, unnamed (Sidney Poitier), tells a story to a white prison psychiatrist (Peter Falk) who’s hitting a wall with a Black patient. It’s 1942 in the flashback, and Poitier’s character is assigned a young leader from the German American Bund, unnamed (Bobby Darin), serving a two-year sentence for sedition. As the two men speak, we learn the details of the patient’s early life, the sources of his hatred, the reasons for his terrifying dreams. The story is eerily of our time, a stark commentary on psychopathy and political success. It’s stunning to see that Bobby Darin was a hugely gifted actor. ★★★★

Brainstorm (dir. William Conrad, 1965). Yes, that William Conrad, the heavy of The Killers, the detective of Cannon. Here he directs a story of erotic obsession, deception, and madness, with a straight-arrow scientist (Jeffrey Hunter) who saves the life of and falls in love with the young wife (Anne Francis) of his boss (Dana Andrews). What follows is indeed a crack-up. I had to sign an NDA to watch this movie and cannot reveal anything more. ★★★★

Pretty Poison (dir. Noel Black, 1968). Dennis (Anthony Perkins) is a young arsonist, just released from psychiatric hospital where he spent most of his adolescence; Sue Ann (Tuesday Weld) is an honor-roll student and drum majorette who falls under his spell — and vice versa. Dennis claims to be a CIA agent, a fiction that makes his life of factory labor more exciting; Sue Ann buys into the fiction, and together they plot — oops, there’s another NDA. All I can say is that she is madder than he is. Filmed in the Berkshires, with immediately recognizable locations for anyone who knows the area. ★★★★

Targets (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1968). Bogdanovich’s first film, in which two storylines converge: a clean-cut young husband (Tim O’Kelly) modeled on Charles Whitman embarks on a killing spree in the San Fernando Valley, and a fading star of horror movies (Boris Karloff) prepares for an appearance at a drive-in theater. The movie is a darkly comic commentary on American gun culture and American entertainment. I sense a major debt to Hitchcock, in matters large and small, especially in the brilliant, bizarre ending. Karloff’s dapper Byron Orlok has the best line: “Is that what I was afraid of?” ★★★★

*

Busses Roar (dir. D. Ross Lederman, 1942). German and Japanese agents plan to place a bomb on a night bus to San Francisco with the aim of damaging oil wells, and the scheme — no surprise — is foiled. Most of this B-movie is devoted to the people of the bus terminal: drivers, travelers, servicemen passing through, a ticket seller, a cashier at a tobacco and magazine counter, a porter, a panhandler, a woman waiting for her husband, a woman who’s broke and trying to borrow $5.40 for a ticket. Ugly racial stereotypes abound. The movie has Eleanor Parker’s first screen appearance, as Norma, the cashier, a long way from the von Trapp villa. ★ (TCM)

*

Shadow of Fear (dir. Albert S. Rogell, 1955). Hamlet hangs over this story: upon her father’s death, April Haddon (Mona Freeman), a student studying in America, returns to her home in an English village. Her mother died the year before; Florence Haddon (Jean Kent), her mother’s nurse and her father’s second wife, now runs the house; and we’re meant to have no doubt that Florence did away with both Haddons, will do away with April, and thus will inherit an estate. A wonderful game of cat and mouse, with April figuring things out and matching wits with a wicked, wicked stepmother. My favorite line: “Nothing’s too awful for that woman!” ★★★★ (YT)

*

This Was a Woman (dir. Tim Whelan, 1948). The dark triad is alive and kicking in Sylvia Russell (the Agnes Moorehead-like Sonia Dresdel), a British wife and mother who seeks to destroy the happiness of her husband Arthur (Walter Fitzgerald) and daughter Fenella (Barbara White). (Her son Terry (Emrys Jones) is off the hook.) Malevolence abounding, with family members making allowance after allowance, but when Arthur’s successful friend Austin Penrose (Cyril Raymond) comes to visit, Sylvia’s schemes take a new direction. My favorite line: “You’re like someone drawing soothing fingers along an exposed nerve.” ★★★★ (YT)

Related reading
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Eleven movies, one series

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

Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder, 1944). I like the way Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) fingers his bloody pack of cigarettes as he dictates his confession to Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). I like the utter bizarreness of Barabra Stanwyck’s wig. I like the match-lighting reversal that ends the movie. I could watch this movie again and again — oh, I already have. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Roses Are Red (dir. James Tinling, 1947). You’ve seen the recent New York Times article about doppelgängers and DNA? Well, the new DA (Don Castle) is a dead ringer for a recently paroled crime boss (Don Castle), so the crime boss kidnaps the DA, learns his mannerisms and habits, and take his place. The weird thing is that the two men’s romantic partners (Peggy Knudsen, Patricia Knight) also resemble one another. Preposterous but pleasant. ★★★ (YT)

*

Directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz

Veslemøy’s Song (2018). A beautifully made short film in which a search for the past brings back a fragment. Audrey Benac (Deragh Campbell) discovers a familial connection to Kathleen Parlow (1890–1963), a celebrated Canadian violinist, and makes a trip to the New York Public Library in search of Parlow’s recording of “Veslemøy’s Song.” The filmmaker blurs the line between documentarian and storyteller. The credits help to clear things up. ★★★★ (CC)

Never Eat Alone (2016). Aha: it turns out that Veslemøy’s Song is a brief epilogue to this film, and that Audrey Benac (Deragh Campbell) is a recurring figure in Bohdanowicz’s films, a stand-in for the director. Here Audrey visits and speaks with her grandmother Joan Benac (Joan Benac, the director’s grandmother), with memories and CBC footage of a 1950s(?) musical-theater production in which Joan appeared with her one-time boyfriend Don Radovich (played by George Radovics, the director’s partner’s grandfather). Is it possible to locate Don and recover that past? It all sounds like a rehearsal for “Finding Frances” (Nathan for You, 2017), but this dark, quiet film ends up going nowhere, not even to a listening room in the New York Public Library. ★★★ (CC)

*

Dead of Night (dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, and Robert Hamer, 1945). An anthology movie: in an English country house, a group of friends and an odd interloper tell spooky tales. “Christmas Party,” with its Turn of the Screw overtones, and “The Haunted Mirror” are for me the best of the lot. Fun to see Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne (from The Lady Vanishes) in “Golfing Story,” but that story feels interminable, as does “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy.” The frame story ends up being a disappointment, but I don’t think any other frame could fit. ★★★ (TCM)

*

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Based on the life story of Robert Elliott Burns, with Paul Muni as an unemployed Great War vet and aspiring engineer sentenced to ten years of hard labor after being tricked into abetting a robbery. Pre-Code Warner Bros. moviemaking with an emphasis on social justice, exposing the utter brutality of chain-gang life. Ninety years later, it’s still strong stuff. With Edward Ellis, Glenda Farrell, Noel Francis, Allen Jenkins, and forward-looking cinematography by Sol Polito. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Missing Women (dir. Philip Ford, 1951). Hmm — a Republic Picture that we’ve never heard of, so it could be a hidden gem, or at least a hidden shard of colorful glass. But it wasn’t even mediocre. Even the title is off: there’s a missing woman, singular (Penny Edwards), who’s missing because she’s dyed her hair and gone underground to find the car thieves who killed her husband. Look for Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson from Adventures of Superman) as the thief-in-chief. ★ (YT)

*

The Crowd (dir. King Vidor, 1928). I have no great acquaintance with silent movies, but I think there can be little debate that The Crowd is one of the greatest. It’s the story of the Sims, John (James Murray) and Mary (Eleanor Boardman, then married to the director), their courtship and marriage, with moments of joy, moments of great difficulty, and an inconceivable tragedy. This movie does not flinch. Murray (who came to a bad end) has a Dick Powell cheerfulness; Boardman’s performance and Henry Sharp’s cinematography take us into modern times. ★★★★ (TCM)

[Here’s the 78 that plays as everyone dances: Johnny Marvin’s recording of “There’s Everything Nice about You.”]

*

I Love a Mystery (dir. Henry Levin, 1945). Me too, but not this one. In the words of one character, “The whole thing sounds so preposterous.” From the radio serial of the same name, with Jim Bannon and Barton Yarborough as detectives Jack Packard and Doc Long, and Nina Foch and George Macready as a married couple with money and secrets. A Tibetan secret society, a near-death by flaming dessert, a murderous stalker with a peg leg, and a mummy in need of a look-alike replacement head are just four of the elements in the story. ★★ (TCM)

*

The Cobweb (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1955). CinemaScope soap opera, on a grand scale. The setting is a psychiatric hospital, run by Dr. Stewart McIver (Richard Widmark), who ignores his wife Karen (Gloria Grahame) (the implication is that, in the language of the time, she’s “frigid”) but shows interest in a staff member (Lauren Bacall). A dispute over the choice for new drapes in the hospital library precipitates crises on multiple fronts. The cast includes Charles Boyer, Lillian Gish, Oscar Levant (as, no surprise, a patient), and Fay Wray. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Lost Horizon (dir. Frank Capra, 1937). A plane crash in the Himalayas leaves a motley group of white folks — a diplomat (Ronald Colman), a con man (Thomas Mitchell), a paleontologist (Edward Everett Horton), and others — in the mysterious realm of Shangri-La, a world unto itself, removed (sort of) from time, sunny and warm, devoted to peaceful leisure — and run by a white man, with Asian men and women doing all the necessary work. It’s like an all-inclusive island vacation with a heavy dash of mysticism. And I have to admit — it’s also an extraordinarily beautiful film. With Sam Jaffe, H.B. Warner, Jane Wyatt (that’s a double in the from-a-great-distance nude scene), and not one Asian actor receiving a screen credit or speaking in a more than perfunctory way. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The U.S. and the Holocaust (dir. Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, 2022). Work on this PBS documentary series began in 2015. The makers must have experienced an especially uncanny dread as our world came more and more to resemble the world of the film. Racism, xenophobia, “America First,” dreams of a wall, conspiracy-mongering about “globalists,” genocidal violence — here we were, and are once again. And eighty and more years ago, the good works of small numbers of Americans were everywhere overshadowed by indifference or hostility to an immigrant other: as the historian Deborah Lipstadt says on camera, “No one wanted these people.” ★★★★ (PBS)

Related reading
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Twelve more movies

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2017). A third-tier sculptor, two of his three wives, and his three adult children. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, perhaps, but here it’s a way very much influenced by Anton Chekhov, Woody Allen, and Wes Anderson. My favorite line: “You guys will never know what it’s like to be me in this family.” The all-star cast includes Candice Bergen, Judd Hirsch, Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Emma Thompson. But there’s less here than meets the eye.

*

A Stranger in Town (dir. Roy Rowland, 1943). A Supreme Court justice (Frank Morgan) travels incognito for a brief vacation and, still incognito, sets things right in a small town. The claustrophobia and corruption of small-town life are played for laughs, and justice wins in the end, just as in real life. At the one-stop shop for obscurities, YouTube.

*

Alimony (dir. Alfred Zeisler, 1949). Martha Vickers is the starring attraction in a sketchy lawyer’s scheme: have her marry a rich guy, frame him for infidelity, sue for divorce, and collect, yes, alimony, with the lawyer taking a cut. I especially liked the scenes of boarding house life and Leonid Kinskey’s comic turn as a theatrical producer. The movie moves toward Detour-like sordidness before steering (crazily) to a disappointingly wholesome ending. Another YouTube find.

*

Stranger Things, second season (dir. Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, Shawn Levy, Andrew Stanton, Rebecca Thomas, 2017). I described the first season of Stranger Things as Ghostwriter meets E.T. The second season might be described as Ghostwriter meets E.T. meets Theseus-and-the-Minotaur meets The Exorcist. Darker, scarier than the first season, and excellent fun. Caution: contains nougat.

*

My Cousin Vinny (dir. Jonathan Lynn, 1992). Someone recommended this wonderful comedy to Elaine. Somehow we had never seen it. Someday you should see it if you haven’t. A neophyte Brooklyn lawyer, or “lawyer” (Joe Pesci), travels to Alabama to defend his cousin and his cousin’s friend, two college fellows wrongly accused of murder. It’s a good thing that Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) comes along. I’m not surprised to learn that lawyers love this film. But I am surprised to learn that the film is used in teaching law.

*

One of Us (dir. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2017). The documentarians of Detropia and Jesus Camp look at the struggles of three ex-Hasidim: Etty, a mother of seven who’s fled an abusive husband; Luzer, a struggling actor; and Ari, a young man who was raped as a child and is now bedeviled by drugs. Each has grown up without skills of work and social life; each now tries to establish an identity apart from an insular culture of surveillance and intimidation that demands absolute conformity to its rules. (Talk about fundamentalism: Etty shows the filmmakers a son’s reading primer in which every girl’s face has been blacked out.) As the film makes clear, the cost of leaving the community can be very high.

*

The Exception (dir. David Leveaux, 2016). Love and espionage in wartime. Christopher Plummer plays Kaiser Wilhelm in exile in the Netherlands. In his grand house, an affair begins between a German officer (Jai Courtney) and a maid (Lily James). The narrative is somewhat predictable, but with moments of genuine suspense. Best scene: dinner with Himmler, as the Kaiser meets the new order.

*

Maudie (dir. Aisling Walsh, 2016). The life of Maud Lewis (Sally Hawkins), self-taught Canadian artist. Lewis suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and lived in rural isolation and poverty, married to a man who here seems at times emotionally inert, at other times downright abusive. Is Ethan Hawke’s brutish Everett Lewis a just representation of Maud’s husband? Is Maud’s inarticulateness (which seems to suggest intellectual disability) a just representation of her character? I don’t know. Worth watching, but the film leaves so many matters unaddressed, including the first thirty-odd years of Lewis’s life.

*

20th Century Women (dir. Mike Mills, 2016). It is 1979 in Santa Barbara. Annette Bening plays Dorothea Fields, a divorced mother, a Salem smoker, the first female drafting technician at the Continental Can Company, and the owner of a rambling old house with boarders. To raise her fourteen-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), Dorothea enlists the help of her boarder Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and the girl next door, Julie (Elle Fanning). Dorothea’s male boarder William (Billy Crudup), all mustache and chambray, is put to other purposes. The film moves from character to character, as if from room to room (with title cards giving each character’s name and year of birth), and is much more about character than “action.” Most of the events in the film, I realize, arrive in the form of conversations. Exceedingly well written and acted.

*

Notorious (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1946). Ingrid Bergman as Alicia Huberman, daughter of a Nazi spy, recruited by American intelligence to infiltrate a group of post-war Nazis in Brazil. Cary Grant is Devlin, the American agent who loves her. Claude Rains is Alex Sebastian, a Nazi in Brazil, also in love with Alicia. (Ick.) The Bergman–Grant scenes make Notorious the most erotic Hitchcock film I’ve seen. But it’s Leopoldine Konstantin, as Alex’s mother, who steals the show.

*

Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954). I remember the excitement when this film, Vertigo, and three others returned to theaters in the 1980s. Why not watch yet again? Or better — why not watch the people across the courtyard, and watch Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly watch the people across the courtyard? Something I don’t think I’d noticed before: the bamboo shades (think theater curtain) go down during the closing credits. And Thelma Ritter’s lines: “In the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker. Any of those bikini bombshells you’re always watching worth a red-hot poker?” How’d they get that past the censors?

*

The Promise (dir. Terry George, 2016). A love triangle — a journalist, a governess, a medical student — in the time of the Armenian genocide. Early on, the film’s lavish attention to beautiful costumes and sets threatens to displace attention from the characters. Later, events themselves make the characters seem less and less important. Some descriptions of the film speak of a love triangle “set against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide.” But what does it mean to think of genocide as a backdrop? To my mind, the most moving scene in the film is the final one, one that has nothing to do with the triangle. As the movies teach us, the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

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Twelve movies

[Or eleven movies and one mini-series. Surely a seven-episode Netflix series equals at least one movie. One to four stars, four sentences each, no spoilers.]

Up the Down Staircase (dir. Robert Mulligan, 1967). I never tire of this movie: I adore Sandy Dennis, and I admire the indefatigable optimism that Miss Sylvia Barrett brings to the work of teaching in the trenches. I will also admit to admiring her students’ quickness to leap at any occasion for comedy: witness “There is no frigate like a book.” It didn’t register with me until this viewing that the movie confirms Hazard Adams’s description of the nonlife stereotype of the teacher: we see nothing of Miss Barrett’s life beyond her school and the block that she walks from and to the bus stop. Best scene: the trial: “I’m me.” ★★★★

*

Impact (dir. Arthur Lubin, 1949). A captain of industry and devoted husband (Brian Donleavy) finds his life turned upside down when he gives his wife’s “cousin” a ride. Donleavy and Ella Raines are wooden; Helen Walker, the story’s evil schemer, is far more compelling. Good scenes of small-town life and a wild chase through narrow San Francisco streets. My favorite line: “I’ll never think of our moments together without nausea.” ★★

*

Shadow of a Doubt (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1943). I’ve written about this movie before, so I’ll limit myself to some noticings here. When we first see Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten), lying fully dressed on a bed, he looks embalmed, save that he’s smoking. The number of his rooming house: 13. Young Charlie Newton (Theresa Wright) is described as “the smartest girl in her class,” and we see her in what looks like a high-school graduation photograph, but her future is never even suggested. The scene in the ’Til-Two bar is a poignant picture of worlds colliding: goody two-shoes Charlie and sultry but tired waitress Louise Finch (Janet Shaw): “I never thought I’d see you in here.” ★★★★

*

The Naked City (dir. Jules Dassin, 1948). The only place to go before or after you watch all 138 episodes of the television series. The plot is meh, and the actors, good though they may be, are almost superfluous, but so what: this movie is all about New York: El stops, swank shops, ratty tenements, crowded luncheonettes. “You got any cold root beer?” “Like ice.” ★★★★

*

Uncovering “The Naked City” (dir. Bruce Goldstein, 2020). One film lover’s exploration of the film’s locations and production. Bruce Goldstein is beyond knowledgable, about The Naked City and about Manhattan then and now. The detail that most amazed me: he tracked down the days for filming a scene from the changing titles on a theater marquee. A Criterion Channel exclusive. ★★★★

*

David Copperfield (dir. George Cukor, 1935). A feast for actors, especially character actors: Freddie Bartholomew and Frank Lawton as David the boy and man, Basil Rathbone as grim Mr. Murdstone, Edna May Oliver as Aunt Betsey, Lionel Barrymore as Dan’l Peggotty, and Maureen O’Sullivan as Dora. The three standouts: W. C. Fields as Mr. Micawber, Lennox Pawle as Mr. Dick, and Roland Young as Uriah Heep. Such a raft of talent. The most poignant scenes: David and Dora. ★★★★

*

The Christmas Bow (dir. Clare Niederpruem, 2020). Lucia Micarelli and Michael Rady star in a story of violins, injury, disability, shortbread, recorders, festive-themed dishes, street musicians, and Christmas socks. Oh, and a grandfather who comes out of retirement to give a young boy the gift of music. And speaking of music: since when do professional violinists spend their time on unaccompanied renditions of Christmas carols? I am taking away a star because the leads kiss long before the last two minutes of the movie: that’s just wrong. ★★

*

The Queen’s Gambit (dir. Scott Frank, 2020). Isla Johnston and Anya Taylor-Joy are eerily similar as Beth Harmon, child and young adult, a Kentucky orphan and addict with a dark past and the strong sense of pattern recognition that makes her an intuitive genius of chess. Taylor-Joy’s background as a model is unmistakable: Beth’s nerd vibe goes haywire every time we see her walk, runway-style, to a chessboard. Lots of nonsense to savor in the picture of the 1960s: check out the magazines for sale at the Lexington drugstore (which also happens to sell Café Bustelo and Malta Goya). Among the supporting players, Moses Ingram (Jolene), Marielle Heller (Alma Wheatley), and Harry Melling (Harry Beltik) are particularly good. ★★★

*

Strange Cargo (dir. Frank Borzage, 1940). Strange indeed. Lust and love and an escape from a penal colony, starrring a “waitress,” Julie (Joan Crawford), and a prisoner, Verne (Clark Gable), whose only name for Julie is “baby.” Peter Lorre lurks sinisterly in the background. What makes the movie really strange is the presence of Cambreau (Ian Hunter), a Christ-like figure performing miracles and bringing prisoners to redemption. ★★★

*

Becoming (dir. Nadia Hallgren, 2020). A documentary: Michelle Obama, her book, and her book tour. I tried to imagine our current First Lady asking questions of and listening to young people as Michelle Obama does here: it’s just impossible. I still find it remarkable that I met Michelle Obama in 2004 in downstate Illinois, where she had come to campaign for her husband. I’m as giddy now as some of the people in this movie waiting in line to get their books signed. ★★★★

*

Vice Squad (dir. Arnold Laven, 1953). Elaine and I had the same thought: multi-tasking! This police procedural begins with a killing of an officer, goes off in all directions, and ends with a bank heist and hostage-taking. Edward G. Robinson is Captain Barnaby, the calm center in a story whose focus shifts every few minutes (as Yeats said, “The stone’s in the midst of all”). Among the nice turns: Paulette Goddard as the owner of an escort service, Percy Helton as a crackpot troubled by “television shadows,” Byron Kane as a professor who unmasks a phony Italian aristocrat (“His flat a s and his hard r s betray a background of the middle west”), and perennial bad guy Adam Williams as an increasingly desparate suspect. ★★★★

*

Beware, My Lovely (dir. Harry Horner, 1952). An unnerving tour de force for Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan. Lupino is Helen Gordon, a war widow (it’s 1918); Ryan is Howard Wilton, a psychotic handyman who comes in for a day’s work waxing the floors. The movie does a deft job of having Howard’s condition reveal itself ever so slowly, as Helen’s kindness changes to wariness and then desperation as she becomes a prisoner in her house. Close calls, near escapes, and some dramatic camerawork by George E. Diskant — watch for the reflections in the Christmas tree ornaments. ★★★★

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[The nonlife stereotype is described in Hazard Adams’s The Academic Tribes (1988): “Either he is in his office or his classroom or he is nowhere.”]

“Art is fierce”

Toni Morrison:

I want to describe to you an event a young gifted writer reported:

During the years of dictatorship in Haiti, the government gangs, known as the Tonton Macoutes, roamed about the island killing dissenters, and ordinary and innocent people, at their leisure. Not content with the slaughter of one person for whatever reason, they instituted an especially cruel follow-through: no one was allowed to retrieve the dead lying in the streets or parks or in doorways. If a brother or parent or child, even a neighbor ventured out to do so, to bury the dead, honor him or her, they were themselves shot and killed. The bodies lay where they fell until a government garbage truck arrived to dispose of the corpses — emphasizing that relationship between a disposed-of human and trash. You can imagine the horror, the devastation, the trauma this practice had on the citizens. Then, one day, a local teacher gathered some people in a neighborhood to join him in a garage and put on a play. Each night they repeated the same performance. When they were observed by a gang member, the killer only saw some harmless people engaged in some harmless theatrics. But the play they were performing was Antigone, that ancient Greek tragedy about the moral and fatal consequences of dishonoring the unburied dead.

Make no mistake, this young writer said: art is fierce.

From “The Habit of Art.” 2010. In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).

All of which is a preface to this reminder that Theater of War presents a streaming performance of Antigone in Ferguson, tonight, 7:30 CDT. Zoom required. Register here.

A great sadness of my teaching life is that the teaching of “backgrounds” in my English department appears to have disappeared with my retirement. “Backgrounds” as I understood the word meant beginnings, of epic, lyric, tragedy, and comedy. Say, Homer, Virgil, and Ovid; Sappho and Catullus; Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes.

Anyone who thinks that “the classics” no longer have anything to teach us isn’t paying attention.

Related reading
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Eleven movies, one series

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Disney, Max, Netflix, a movie theater, YouTube.]

Live Fast, Die Young (dir. Paul Henreid, 1958). No one dies, and the movie is far better than the lurid title suggests. Kim (Mary Murphy) and Jill Winters (Norma Eberhardt), a hashslinger and a high-school senior, are sisters living with their unemployed drunk of a father (Gordon Jones, Mike the cop of the Abbott and Costello world). When Kim leaves home for a career of petty and more serious crime (lived to a jazz and rock ‘n’ roll score and featuring Mike Connors), Mary follows to search for her sister and bring her back. Eberhardt, who affects a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, has the best line: “Nothing’s against anything until you’re caught!” ★★★★ (YT)

*

So Young, So Bad (dir. Bernard Vorhaus, 1950). Life at a “corrective school” for girls, with a know-nothing administrator, a sadistic matron, and Dr. John Jason (Paul Henreid), a newly hired psychiatrist intent on making a better life for the school’s inmates, who spend their days doing laundry and tending potato fields. A second administrator (Catherine McLeod) doubts he can make any changes. Sparks fly. Three actors make their first major appearance in movies here: Anne Francis as an unmarried mother, Anne Jackson as a butch gal, and Rosita (Rita) Moreno as a social isolate who finds refuge in dreams of escape. ★★★ (YT)

*

Lonelyhearts (dir. Vincent J. Donehue, 1958). A loose adaptation of Nathanael West’s novella Miss Lonelyhearts. Montgomery Clift is Adam White, Miss Lonelyhearts, writing an advice column for a big-city newspaper; Robert Ryan is Shrike, the paper’s editor-in-chief, a man given to tormenting and tempting Adam; Myrna Loy is Mrs. Shrike, an alienated wife who likes the company of younger men (including Adam). Maureen Stapleton seems terribly miscast as a newspaper reader intent on seducing Adam. Adam’s backstory and the movie’s happy ending would have been enough to make West say “Look what they’ve done to my novella, ma.” ★★★ (YT)

*

Gun Crazy (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1950). I’ll watch this movie whenever it shows up. A delirious crime spree, with Bart Tare (John Dall), an army vet fascinated by guns but horrified by killing, and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) a sideshow sharpshooter who’s even crazier than Bart. Dominance, submission, and weirdness abounding. Look at Bart and Laurie lying next to each other after making an escape: they’re panting like partners who have just made love. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Beach Boys (dir. Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny, 2024). This documentary is most valuable as a visual history, with photographs, news footage, and what look like home movies. It’s telling that the first member of the group seen and heard in a non-archival interview is Mike Love, who’s given considerable screen time to talk (about how he was not given enough credit and how Murry Wilson sold the rights to his songs) and to choke up about what he would like to say to Brian Wilson (“I’ll see you in court”?). The documentary omits the deaths of Dennis Wilson and Carl Wilson, Brian’s late-career renaissance, the completed SMiLE, and much more, and things end on a strange note: an intertitle reports Pet Sounds going gold and platinum in 2000 as “Kokomo” (gah!) begins to play over the credits. Endless Harmony (dir. Alan Boyd, 1998) is a much better introduction to the group’s history. ★★ (D)

*

Touch (dir. Paul Schrader, 1997). An American story of commerce and religion, from a novel by Elmore Leonard. Juvenal (Skeet Ulrich) is an ex-monk and stigmatic whose touch heals people. Bill Hill (Christopher Walken) is an ex-evangelist who sees Juvenal as a potential star and gets Lynn Faulkner (Bridget Fonda) to push him in that direction, even as a religious fanatic (Tom Arnold) is enraged by Juvenal and Lynn’s relationship. “Juvenal”: yes, it’s satire, but it’s meandering and sleepy. ★★ (CC)

*

The FBI Story (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1959). It starts out well, as a police procedural, with file cabinets, magnifying glasses, and switchboards, but it slowly goes downhill. James Stewart is FBI agent Chip Hardesty, whose peripatetic career finds him investigating Klan violence, murders of Native Americans, famous gangsters, a mass murder, Nazi conspirators, and Communist agents. It’s all set against a Capraesque story of marriage and family, with Stewart and Vera Miles as George and Mary Bailey 2.0, trading lines of creaky, corny dialogue. Best segment: the story of the hollow coin. ★★ (TCM)

*

Hilda Crane (dir. Philip Dunne, 1956). “In case you didn’t know, courtesan is a fancy word for tramp !”: so says Hilda Crane (Jean Simmons), back home with her mother (Judith Evelyn, Miss Lonelyhearts in Rear Window) after being let go from a job in New York. Hilda, whose years away include a spell of cohabitation and two divorces, finds herself pursued by two men: the louche professor (Jean-Pierre Aumont) who has pronounced her a courtesan, and a noble architect (Guy Madison) whose mother (Evelyn Varden, Icey Spoon in The Night of the Hunter) has definite ideas about her son’s future. But what does Hilda want as her future? Stagey in the extreme (from a play by Samuel Raphaelson), loopy in its lurch to a conclusion, and highly revealing of at least some people’s ideas about gender and sexuality at mid-century. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Human Comedy (dir. Clarence Brown, 1943). It began as a screenplay by William Saroyan that proved far too long for a movie. Life in wartime in the fictional Ithaca, California, with a high-school student, Homer (!) Macauley (Mickey Rooney), who works nights as a postal-telegram delivery boy to help his widowed mother get by. The movie moves from vignette to vignette, taking in the Macauley family (Ray Collins is the spirit of the dead father; Fay Bainter is the mother; Donna Reed is their daughter), the telegraph office (Frank Morgan is a hard-drinking but indefatigable operator), townspeople young and old, and visiting servicemen, with shifts now and then to Homer’s elder brother Marcus (Van Johnson), already away from home in military service and preparing to go overseas. For all its unabashed sentimentality, this human comedy makes considerable room for tragedy, and I can only imagine what it must have felt like to watch in 1943. ★★★★ (TCM)

[A well-known leading man made his uncredited debut in this movie.]

*

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, second season (dir. Andrew Jarecki, 2024). The second (final?) season of the The Jinx covers Robert Durst’s trial, conviction, and sentencing in the murder of his friend Susan Berman and his death four months later. The people on camera are an array of heroes and villains: a dedicated cold-case prosecutor, long-suffering members of Durst’s first wife’s family, Durst family members who did nothing when Durst’s first wife disappeared, friends who display a bewildering allegiance to a killer, and a second wife of convenience determined to keep Durst’s assets from going to his first wife’s family. And above all, Durst himself, quick and conniving on telephone calls, whiny and defiant in the courtroom, avoiding justice again and again (remind you of anyone?). As the credits for the final episode roll, the Jeff Beck/Joss Stone cover of “I Put a Spell on You” plays — aptly, aptly. ★★★★ (M)

*

Wicked Little Letters (dir. Thea Sharrock, 2023). Post-Great War in Sussex, with pious unmarried Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) receiving bizarrely obscene anonymous letters. Suspicion falls on her free-spirit neighbor Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), and an arrest and trial follow. An assiduous constable, Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), has doubts about Rose’s guilt and enlists the help of other neighborhood women to set things straight. Wonderfully comic, at times suspenseful, with handwriting at the center of things, and based on a true story that seems like something out of Dickens. ★★★★ (N)

*

Inside Out 2 (dir. Kelsey Mann, 2024). Late in the film, we heard a young audience member ask a grown-up, “Why is Riley sad?” In this (not really for kids) sequel, Riley Andersen, now thirteen, is beset by Puberty, which arrives in the form of a wrecking ball that destroys her Sense of Self (capitals are fitting for this allegorical tale), after which a new array of emotions take control: Anxiety, Embarrassment, Ennui, and Envy. That old Sense of Self was a beautiful, symmetrical, silver structure, the work of a mind that could say “Mom and Dad are proud of me” and “I’m a good person”; the new one is a jagged, asymmetrical, fiery mess, whose main theme is “I’m not good enough.” But — and because it’s a Disney movie, it’s no spoiler — the kid is going to be all right, and more complicated. ★★★★ (T)

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