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)

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

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)

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
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

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)

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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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Twelve movies

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

She Said (dir. Maria Schrader, 2022). A dramatization of the New York Times investigation of Harvey Weinstein’s long history of predation. Times reporters Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) are indefatigable in their pursuit of truth, taking planes and trains on short notice, showing up unannounced to try for interviews, working until midnight and cabbing home to their husbands and children. I especially liked the conference calls, with Times editor Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher) unintimidated by Weinstein’s (Mike Houston) bluster and bullshit. My favorite scene: everyone gathered around one screen, reading copy before hitting Publish. ★★★★ (N)

*

Night Tide (dir. Curtis Harrington, 1961). A sailor (Dennis Hopper) and a professional mermaid (Linda Lawson) meet on the Santa Monica pier, and complications follow. I wonder if this movie influenced Carnival of Souls (1962), another strange and stylish low-budget black-and-white effort. Another possible connection: the 1963 Route 66 episode “The Cruelest Sea of All,” about a romance between Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) and a possibly real mermaid (Diane Baker). Adding value here: an opening scene with a jazz quartet that includes Paul Horn, and an inventive score by David Raksin, who wrote the music for the great standard “Laura.” ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Man from Laramie (dir. Anthony Mann, 1955). Paranoia, sadism, and vengeance way out west. James Stewart is the man from Laramie, Will Lockhart, who’s transported a wagonload of goods to a remote town for a purpose that becomes clear as the plot thickens. Lockhart comes up against the Waggomans, a powerful ranching family with an erratic, violent son (Alex Nichol). Also present: Donald Crisp as the Waggoman patriarch, Arthur Kennedy as a dutiful ranch foreman, Cathy O’Donnell as a shopkeeper, and Wallace Ford as a sidekick. Spectacular camerawork (CinemaScope) makes for stunning scenes. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Way Down (dir. Marina Zenovich, 2021–2022). A cult leader, bizarrely coiffed and grifting off the gullible? No, it’s not about Donald Trump; it’s a documentary in four episodes about Gwen Shamblin (later Gwen Shamblin Lara, or as someone calls her, Gwen Almighty), the mind behind Weigh Down Workshop (a Christian diet program) and the Remnant Fellowship, a Christian church. The goal is perfection, at least superficial perfection, at any cost, because one must be, no joke, thin to enter heaven (one glance at Shamblin’s daughter Elizabeth is enough to understand what might result). An excellent documentary, worthy of, say, Frontline, filled with unwittingly revealing archival footage and numerous interviews of those damaged by this destructive preacher and her abettors. ★★★★ (M)

*

Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults (dir. Clay Tweel, 2020). Do you remember Heaven’s Gate? Founded in 1974 by Marshall Applewhite (“Do,” later “Bo”) and Bonnie Nettles (“Ti,” later “Peep”), it was a UFO-minded millennial cult whose surviving leader Applewhite and another thirty-eight members committed mass suicide in 1997, shedding their “vehicles” as they awaited transport to “the Next Level” and a reunion with “the Older Member” (Nettles) on a UFO supposedly traveling behind the Hale-Bopp comet. This four-part documentary brings together testimony from surviving cult members and family members, commentary by cult experts, Heaven’s Gate home movies, and copious excerpts from audio and video recordings of Applewhite, whose gentle but decidedly crazed affect makes me think of an unhinged Fred Rogers. Two ways in which this documentary might have been improved: remove the unnecessary woodcut-like animations; add much more commentary on the theology at work in the group (Manichaeism, anyone?). ★★★ (M)

*

‌Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence (dir. Zachary Heinzerling, 2023). I had only a vague awareness of Larry Ray, the father of a Sarah Lawrence student, and his so-called sex cult. But “sex cult” hardly begins to describe Ray’s control over a group of young women and men who began by seeing him as a live-in mentor and ended up broken, abused, brainwashed, estranged from their families, from their friends, and from themselves. This is an exceptionally well-made documentary (also Frontline-worthy), never merely lurid, never less than serious, with considerable video and audio from Ray’s documentation of life under his thumb. As I watched, I kept asking myself whether any Sarah Lawrence professor ever thought to ask one of these students the obvious questions: Are you okay? How come you’re not living on campus anymore? ★★★★ (H)

[Which of these cult leaders do you think is the worst? Given his utter cruelty, I think it must be Ray.]

*

The Man in the Net (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1959). Yes, there’s a dragnet, but the larger net in this highly unusual film would appear to be the insular Connecticut town where John Hamilton (Alan Ladd) contends with his unfaithful alcoholic wife Linda (Carolyn Jones), a macho sheriff (Charles McGraw), and an array of well-to-do neighbors. Having given up a position in commercial art, John is struggling to make money as a painter and seems happy only when he’s sketching on a pad, surrounded by the village children. When Linda disappears and John is suspected of murder, it’s the children who take his side. Ladd seems a blank here, barely showing emotion, barely able to run when he needs to, tight-lipped at moments when, really, anyone would shout. ★★★ (YT)

*

Stage Struck (dir. William Night, 1948). When a small-town girl who hopes to become a star is murdered in New York , her sister grows impatient with the police effort and enters the world of “acting classes” and “hostess” work to figure out whodunit. Thoroughly mediocre, with detectives sleepwalking their way through their investigation. No surprises as the movie creeps to its (predictable) end and its fatuous moral: young women, stay home. Look for silent-movie star Evelyn Brent in a brief appearance as an elocution teacher. ★★ (TCM)

*

Nightmare (dir. Maxwell Shane, 1956). Whaddayaknow — it’s a remake of Fear in the Night, by the same director. The abidingly eerie premise: a man (Kevin McCarthy) wakes up certain that he committed a murder: was he dreaming, or awake? Edward G. Robinson, out of place in these low-budget surroundings, is the police detective who guides the possible murderer (his sister-in-law’s boyfriend) to a solution. The movie’s musical emphasis — the possible murderer is a jazz clarinetist; his girlfriend (Connie Russell) is a singer — feels gratuitous, but it does afford the viewer the chance to see Billy May as a cranky New Orleans bandleader. ★★ (YT)

*

Lighthouse (dir. Frank Wisbar, 1947). A variation on The Postman Always Rings Twice, with kindly, unglamorous lighthouse keeper Hank (John Litel) his sleazy Clark Gable-lookalike assistant Sam (Don Castle), and the extraordinarily beautiful landlubber Connie (June Lang), who marries Hank to get back at two-timing Sam. And there they are, the three of them, cooped up in a lighthouse together: what’s gonna happen? A low-budget production with capable acting and some inexpensive artistic touches (brief interludes of music and ocean waves). And a surprisingly frank dinner conversation about Connie’s past. ★★★ (TCM)

[A surprise: Don Castle became an associate producer on the television series Lassie, produced by his old college roommate Jack Wrather.]

*

Prison Ship (dir. Arthur Dreifuss, 1945). Life and death on a Japanese hell ship. Nina Foch (looking remarkably like Angela Lansbury) leads the cast as a captive British war correspondent in possession of photographic evidence of Japanese atrocities. Among the other prisoners under the authority of Captain Osikawa (Richard Loo): Ludwig Donath, Robert Lowert, Louis Mercier, Barbara Pepper, and Erik Rolf, all of whom are familiar faces if not names. The story told here, of passengers with nothing to lose deciding to fight back, is eerily familiar to anyone who recalls Flight 93, September 11, 2001. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Parallel Mothers (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2021). I saw it in a theater last year, and I’ll let the sentences I wrote then speak their piece. What I’ll add: the closing words from Eduardo Galeano are more relevant than ever when the truths of history are everywhere threatened. Almodóvar understands that it’s impossible for a person or a culture to move forward without learning the truth about the past. The final moments, with four generations walking together to bear witness to the past, make for what I think must be one of the great movie endings. ★★★★ (DVD)

[Click for a larger view.]

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From 1945 and 1943

From today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”

The fascist playbook, as described in this pamphlet, repeats as the playbook of today’s hard right: cast one’s cause as “super-Americanism,” foment domestic disunity and hatred of minorities, reject the need for international cooperation, and label one’s opponents communists.

You can read the pamphlet at the Internet Archive.

And from 1943, there’s the anti-fascist short film Don’t Be a Sucker.

Ten movies, two seasons

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

The Human Jungle (dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1954). As newly assigned police captain John Danforth, Gary Merrill is Captain Hardass, cracking down on card-playing, whiskey-sneaking cops. He also seeks to solve the murder of a stripper, who, as he points out, was a human being. A chase through a Pabst Blue Ribbon brewery adds zest. With Chuck Connors, Emile Meyer (Mr. Halloran in Blackboard Jungle), and Jan Sterling. ★★ (YT)

*

The Young Savages (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1961). It opens with an act of blunt, brutal violence and goes on to add layer upon layer of complication. Burt Lancaster plays a district attorney prosecuting three white teenagers for the murder of a Latino teenager. One of those charged is the son of an old flame (Shelley Winters). With John Davis Chandler, Telly Savalas (as a brutal cop), Pilar Seurat, and Stanley Kristien, an actor with just three other screen credits, one for Route 66 and one for Naked City, so you know he’s good. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (dir. Norman Foster, 1948). Another movie that opens with an act of blunt, brutal violence, but here it’s unpremeditated, the act of a veteran and former POW, Bill Saunders (Burt Lancaster), suffering from what we can now recognize as PTSD. “The wounds of war, whether of the mind or the of the body, heal slowly,” words on the screen tell us. Bill finds refuge in the London apartment of Jane Wharton (Joan Fontaine), a lonely woman whose sweetheart was killed in battle; the tentative, uneasy relationship that develops between them is threatened, again and again, by a small-time criminal (Robert Newton) who saw what Bill did. An excellent, artfully made noir with an improbable and misleading title. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Go Tell It on The Mountain (dir. Stan Lathan, 1985). An American Playhouse adaptation of James Baldwin’s first novel. Like the novel, the film moves back and forth in time and place, between the rural Jim Crow south and Harlem, mapping the intergenerational consequences of misogyny and patriarchy in a family whose existence encompasses only two realities: home and church (the great Satan is “the streets”). Baldwin, who told The New York Times he was “very, very happy” with the adaptation, gets the last word: “It did not betray the book.” With James Bond III, Rosalind Cash, Olivia Cole, Ruby Dee, and Paul Winfield. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Appointment with Crime (dir. John Harlow, 1946). A shocker, this one is, Yoda might say. A small-time criminal is abandoned by his cronies in a failed heist; now out of prison, he’s looking for revenge. As small-timer Leo Martin, William Hartnell looks both vulnerable and creepy, like a cross between Alan Ladd and Norman Lloyd, a dangerous combination for dancehall hostess Carol Dane (Joyce Howard). A surprising element: Herbert Lom as an antiques dealer and Alan Wheatley as his live-in amanuensis: how did those guys get past the censors? ★★★ (YT)

*

Appointment with a Shadow (dir. Richard Carlson, 1957). It’s a B-movie variation on The Lost Weekend, with George Nader as an alcoholic reporter who’s promised a big story if he can go one day without drinking. George Nader gives a strong performance as reporter Paul Baxter — sweaty, jittery, bedeviled by car horns and reminders of alcohol: billboards, a liquor-store delivery man, radio commercials. Joanna Moore (Tatum O’Neal’s mother) is his loyal girlfriend; Brian Keith, his girlfriend’s skeptical brother. The big story, with a twist and a chase through the night, adds to the movie’s interest. ★★★ (YT)

*

This Woman Is Dangerous (dir. Felix E. Feist, 1952). Joan Crawford is Beth Austin, a criminal boss, heading a heist outfit and struggling to manage her ultra-needy, ultra-jealous boyfriend of nine years, Matt Jackson (David Brian). When she calls off a heist to schedule eye surgery, because otherwise she’ll be blind in a week, she ends up falling in love with her surgeon, Dr. Ben Halleck (Dennis Morgan). Some nifty police tricks (tapping into telephone lines), and a good final scene as the two rivals come face to face, sort of, in an operating theater where all the doctors in attendance are masked. Insanely improbable melodrama. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The White Lotus (created by Mike White, seasons one and two 2021–2022). I asked my daughter — our TV influencer — if she could recommend something to watch, and this series was her answer, and what a good answer. For anyone who’s not seen it, it’s something of a darkly funny whodunit and whogotit, following the fortunes of moneyed, troubled vacationers at a White Lotus resort. As the season begins, someone has been murdered, and then we go back one week to find out what happened. First season: Hawaii, with a sobriety-challenged resort manager (Murray Bartlett), a “magical Negro” spa manager (Natasha Rothwell), an addled solitary traveler (Jennifer Coolidge), and too many more characters to name. ★★★★ (HBO)

[The magical Negro trope is, trust me, meant to be recognized as such.]

Second season: Now we’re at a White Lotus in Sicily, with three generations of horny men looking for their roots (F. Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli, Adam DeMarco), a prostitute looking for customers (Simona Tabasco), two couples in intra- and inter-relationship conflicts (Meghann Fahy and Theo James, Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe), and, once again, too many more characters to name. The star of the season: Jennifer Coolidge, still addled, now traveling with a personal assistant (Haley Lu Richardson). I was happy to find my hunches about whodunit and whogotit and how on the mark, in nearly every respect. My favorite scene: the Sicilian-Americans meeting their cousins. ★★★★ (HBO)

*

Carnal Knowledge (dir. Mike Nichols, 1971). Two men, Jonathan and Sandy (Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel) and five women, Susan (Candice Bergen), Bobbie (Ann-Margret), Cindy (Cynthia O’Neal), Jennifer (Carol Kane), and Louise (Rita Moreno). Jonathan and Sandy begin as Amherst College roommates and blunder their way through relationships: Sandy pressures Susan, his Smith girlfriend, to have sex while Jonathan starts up his own relationship with her; a marriage dissolves (off camera!); another marriage dissolves; Jonathan evaluates prospective partners as one would evaluate animals at a county fair. Jules Feiffer’s screenplay is grimly funny, filled with cliché and misogyny. I can imagine what straight men were asking their partners in 1971: “Babe, you know I’m not like that, right?” ★★★ (TCM)

*

Dear Heart (dir. Delbert Mann, 1964). This movie would pair well, though weirdly, with Carnal Knowledge : it’s a coy look at sexual mores in a world before mustaches and pot. Geraldine Page is Evie Jackson, a lonely postmaster visiting Manhattan for a postal convention; Glenn Ford is Harry Mork, a greeting-card salesman on, well, the make: breaking it off with one woman, already engaged to another, availing himself of a one-night stand with a third — and then along comes Evie. Page is great; Ford, an enigma; and Angela Lansbury has a memorable brief appearance, A large cast with familiar faces in small roles makes the scenes of enforced fun and hilarity worth watching. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Hotel Berlin (dir. Peter Godfrey, 1945). Based on Vicki Baum’s novel, a sequel to her Grand Hotel. Here the setting is a hotel in the waning days of WWII. I was strongly reminded of Casablanca, because everybody comes to the Hotel Berlin: an escaped resistance fighter (Helmut Dantine), Nazi officers (Henry Daniell, Raymond Massey), a famed actress (Andrea King), a Dietrich-like “hostess” (Faye Emerson), a Nobel laureate (Peter Lorre), almost all with a capacity for sharp, grim humor. Their stories intersect in unexpected ways. With a great score by Franz Waxman. ★★★★ (TCM)

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Twelve movies

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

Junebug (dir. Phil Morrison, 2005). One cannot live by film noir alone. A lovely, understated movie, in which Madeleine and George (Embeth Davidtz and Alessandro Nivola), a recently (and hastily) married couple, drive from Chicago to visit George’s family in North Carolina. It’s a crowded, difficult house, with patriarch Eugene (Scott Wilson) nearly inarticulate, matriarch Peg (Celia Weston) burdened with responsibilities, George’s brother Johnny (Ben McKenzie) reluctant about impending fatherhood, and George’s wife Ashley (Amy Adams), a firecracker, as her mother calls her, all agog with plans for the baby. Madeleine’s presence is the final complication: is she here to meet her husband’s family, or to snag the work of a nearby Howard Finster-like artist for her gallery? ★★★★ (CC)

*

She Played with Fire (dir. Sidney Gilliat, 1957). Brit noir with Gothic overtones: a minor fire brings insurance adjuster Oliver Branwell (Jack Hawkins) to a great manor house, where he is surprised to meet up with a woman he loved years before, the now married Sarah Moreton (Arlene Dahl). And then things get complicated — not because of adultery but because of another fire, and forgery, and telltale herbal cigarettes, and a strong touch of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques. Why not four stars? There’s a large problem with the plot, because of an obvious question that’s never asked or answered. ★★★ (YT)

*

Crossroads (dir. Jack Conway, 1942). It’s 1935 (no war), and William Powell is David Talbot, a member of the French diplomatic corps, recently married to Lucienne (Hedy Lamarr) and the likely choice to serve as ambassador to Brazil. But something goes wrong: a threatening letter arrives in the mail, and David Talbot finds himself blackmailed for crimes committed when he was Jean Pelletier, before a case of amnesia wiped out his criminal past. Aside from an opening scene that is almost from pre-Code days, Lamarr has little to do. Also with Basil Rathbone, Claire Trevor, H.B. Warner (Jesus, Gower the druggist, and one of Sunset Boulevard’s waxworks), and Felix Bressart, who steals the movie as a wise, funny psychoanalyst. ★★★ (TCM)

*

A Woman’s Secret (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1949). Okay, but which woman? And when a shot rings out, whose account of what happened is to be believed? At the center of the story is a friendship — “an odd friendship,” one observer calls it — between a former singer turned manager (Maureen O’Hara) and her protege (Gloria Grahame). The implications are unmistakable, even if the movie takes everything back at the end. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Dark Corner (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1946). It was better on a first viewing in 2010. This story of a private detective (Mark Stevens) being stalked (it’s complicated) by another private detective (William Bendix) is super-stylish, with lavish sets (that art gallery!) and slick cinematography by Joe MacDonald. Despite loads of snappy banter, there’s little chemistry between Stevens and his hopelessly devoted secretary (Lucille Ball, who reportedly hated the way the director treated her); the two standouts are Bendix and Clifton Webb as the effete owner of an art gallery. As Elaine said, it’s a good thing that Ball found her true home in comedy. ★★★ (CC)

*

Waiting for Guffman (dir. Christopher Guest, 1996). I wish I could remember who told us, years ago, to watch this faux-documentary about a midwestern town’s effort to celebrate its sesquicentennial. In Blaine, Missouri, the high-school drama teacher, NYC-refugee and gay caricature Corky St. Clair (Guest) is enlisted to stage a musical celebration of the town’s patchy history: founded by travelers who thought they had reached California, Blaine became the Stool Capital of the World and was later visited by ETs who probed several locals. Many types here: a resentful band director (Bob Balaban), a futureless Dairy Queen employee (Parker Posey), a dentist who feels the urge to entertain (Eugene Levy), and the inveterate amateurs whom Corky calls “the Lunts of Blaine" (Catherine O’Hara and Fred Willard). When news comes that a producer from the New York theater world, Mort Guffman, is coming to view Red, White, and Blaine, the need to do well becomes urgent, as Corky and his cast believe that Broadway might be in their future. A hilarious and poignant picture of people doing their best, and dammit, the songs are good, though the best number, “This Bulging River,” is only available as a DVD extra (or from YouKnowWhere). ★★★★ (DVD)

[If you live in a little town, you probably already know what sesquicentennial means.]

*

Gaslight (dir. George Cukor, 1944). A small cast — Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotten are the principals — along with a townhouse that grows smaller and more claustrophobic as the story develops. The principals give brilliant performances — Bergman as an apologetic, self-doubting bride, Boyer as her suave, dictatorial husband, Cotten as a protector watching from afar. And then there’s Angela Lansbury, in her first screen performance, as a nasty servant. Joseph Ruttenberg, a remarkably versatile cinematographer, gives the story a strong infusion of noir. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Mr. District Attorney (dir. Robert B. Sinclair, 1947). Based on a long-running radio serial, with Adolphe Menjou as a hard-driving DA (he’s to the law what Julian Marsh of 42nd Street is to the theater), Dennis O’Keefe as his ethically wavering assistant, George Couloris as a white-collar criminal, and Marguerite Chapman as an inscrutable love interest. Chapman makes the movie, with a role reminiscent of Jane Greer’s Kathie in Out of the Past. With genuinely surprising and suspenseful moments as the movie nears its end. The radio DNA is most noticeable, I think, in the wisecracking by investigator Harrington (Michael O’Shea). ★★★ (YT)

*

What Happened Was . . . (dir. Tom Noonan, 1994). From a two-person play by Noonan, with Noonan and Karen Sillas as Michael and Jackie, co-workers having dinner in Jackie’s apartment on a Friday night. I can’t agree with one reviewer that the movie shows “how people actually behave on a date,” for at least two reasons: it’s not clear to both parties that this meeting is a (first) date, and most people are not Michael and Jackie, and would likely not find themselves engaged in the painful truthtelling that happens in the course of this evening. My favorite moment: the story of the book, which is more than a little heartbreaking. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Midnight Limited (dir. Howard Bretherton, 1940). I’m not a fan of train travel, and least not in its Amtrak incarnation, but I’m a sucker for a train movie: Berlin Express, The Lady Vanishes, The Narrow Margin, Night Train to Munich, North by Northwest, Sleeping Car to Trieste, The Tall Target, Terror by Night. I did not expect much from the low-budget effort (Monogram Pictures), but I found even less: ultra-cheap sets (not a single shot showing the window of a train compartment), wooden acting, and a preposterous plot. Hint to the detective: when a man on a train is robbed of $75,000 in diamonds, start by finding out who knew he was on the train. The one redeeming element of weirdness: George Cleveland (Gramps from Lassie) as a seedy “professor” who bears an at least passing resemblance to Joe Gould (two years before Joseph Mitchell’s New Yorker profile “Professor Sea Gull”). ★ (YT)

*

Crime and Punishment (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1935). I’m not a fan of the novel, which seems to me the work of a writer trying to figure out something new to drop in, chapter by chapter. So in a perverse way, I like this highly condensed adaptation, with fine performances by Peter Lorre as Roderick (!) Raskolnikov, Edward Arnold as Porfiry, and Marian Marsh as Sonya. Condensation aside, we end up with the novel’s sentimentality all the same. Look for Johnny Arthur (father to Darla in Little Rascals shorts) and Michael Mark (the bereaved father in Frankenstein) in small roles. ★★★ (YT)

*

Fear (dir. Alfred Zeisler, 1946). A low-budget (Monogram Pictures) uncredited adaptation of Crime and Punishment, with Raskolnikov turned into Larry Crain (Peter Cookson), a contemporary American college student who loses his scholarship, pawns his father’s watch, and — well, you probably know what’s coming. Here, too, much of the Dostoevsky world is missing. Warren William (the first Perry Mason) is the investigator who dogs Larry; Anne Gywnne is a Sonya sans family, sans sex work. A surprisingly good movie on its own terms, and its full weirdness only becomes clear at the end. ★★★ (YT)

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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)

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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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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)

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Three series, nine movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Mare of Easttown (dir. Craig Zobel, 2021). A seven-episode mini-series starring Kate Winslet as Mare Sheehan, a detective in a small tight-knit (or horribly knotted) Pennsylvania town, trying to solve a string of murders while struggling with a recent familial trauma. Many story lines branching off and intersecting, great writing, and excellent performances from Winslet, Jean Smart (as Mare’s mother Helen), and everyone else. It’s fun to count the tropes: the smartypants new guy, the badge and gun turned in, and so on. The one false note is the visiting creative-writing professor, whose sole book appeared twenty years ago, but his presence might be a joke on the part of the show’s writers. ★★★★

*

McCartney 3, 2, 1 (dir. Zachary Heinzerling, 2021). Rick Rubin talks with Paul McCartney about Beatle songs and Beatle history. That is all ye need to know. Countless revelations about what’s in the tracks: for instance, that the guitar solo in “A Hard Day’s Night” was played at half speed an octave down and then speeded up. As it’s Paul speaking, there’s an occasional backhanded compliment, but the overriding spirit here is his and Rubin’s retrospective joy about what the lads created — and oh, those bass lines when you hear them by themselves. ★★★★

*

The Comeback (created by Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King, 2005 and 2014). An astute consumer of media recommended The Comeback as her favorite television series of all time. It’s a good call. Lisa Kudrow is an incredibly gifted actor (I didn’t know that), here playing Valerie Cherish, a one-time sit-com star trying to get back in the game, even if the game requires reality-TV crews recording her every move as she takes on roles in two new sit-coms. A funny and painful mockumentary series that made me root for its kind, hopeful, clueless, self-obsessed heroine, always trying to do her best in a cruel, cruel business. ★★★★

*

Summer of Soul (dir. Questlove, 2021). You probably know the story: a free outdoor music event, the Harlem Cultural Festival, spanning six Sunday afternoons in the summer of 1969, preserved on film and set aside (for lack of commercial interest) for fifty years. This documentary has generous performance clips, with commentary from musicians and concert-goers. The standouts, for me: the Fifth Dimension (with Billy Davis Jr. and Marilyn McCoo watching their performance and talking about the racial politics of music), Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Sly and the Family Stone. It’s reported that Jimi Hendrix sought to be included but was deemed too far out: imagine how his presence or, say, Miles Davis’s presence, might have electrified (no pun intended) the proceedings. ★★★★

*

The Good Die Young (dir. Lewis Gilbert, 1954). Shades of The Asphalt Jungle: a London gentleman (Laurence Harvey) leads an American vet (Richard Basehart), an American Air Force sergeant (John Ireland), and a British ex-boxer (Stanley Baker) in an effort to commit a perfect crime. Things here are complicated by the men’s marriages: to Margaret Leighton, Joan Collins, Gloria Grahame, and Rene Ray. Each marriage gets a separate piece of the movie. And slowly the four stories are woven together through the fatal magic of contingency. ★★★★

*

Clockwatchers (dir. Jill Sprecher, 1997). The clocks are on the walls of the Global Credit Association, where four temps, Iris, Margaret, Paula, and Jane (Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach), establish a wobbly solidarity against the permanently employed. When things begin to go missing from other people’s desks, it’s the temps who fall under suspicion. A great depiction of the torpor of office culture: IBM Selectrics, supply rooms, Happy Hours, and camaraderie among people who have little in common but the circumstances of their labor. Posey and Kudrow shine. ★★★★

*

The Donut King (dir. Alice Gu, 2020). This documentary starts out well, telling the story of Bun Tek Ngoy (later Ted Ngoy), a Cambodian refugee who became a dominant figure in California donut culture. At first we get a story of success against long odds: a penniless man learns the trade at a Winchell’s Donut House, saves money, goes into business for himself, and is soon sponsoring and then employing other Cambodian refugees in a donut-shop empire. But early and late, there are much darker elements in Ngoy’s story, only some of which the movie acknowledges (hint: read Ngoy’s Wikipedia article). At about fifty minutes in, the movie seemed to wrap up and start over, as if someone were whispering, “It needs to be longer.” ★★

*

Turn the Key Softly (dir. Jack Lee, 1953). One day in the lives of three women just released from prison and returning to London. The backstories: genteel Monica (Yvonne Mitchell) fell in with bad company and took the rap; Stella (Joan Collins), now engaged, was engaged in prostitution; Mrs. Quilliam (Kathleen Harrison) did more than her share of shoplifting. Their three lives now converge in odd and surprising ways. Fine performances, and for anyone afraid of heights, a terrifying scene at a theater. ★★★★

*

Confidential Agent (dir. Herbert Shumlin, 1945). It’s 1937, the Spanish Civil War is raging, and confidential agent Luis Denard (Charles Boyer) has come to London looking to buy coal for the Republican government. The helpers and hinderers he encounters include a wealthy Brit (Lauren Bacall, not even trying to fake a British accent), a teacher of an Esperanto-like language (Peter Lorre), a hotel proprietor (Katina Paxinou), and a maid of all work (Wanda Hendrix). The movie looks back to The 39 Steps and forward to Dark Passage. From a novel by Graham Greene, with great cinematography by James Wong Howe. ★★★★

*

The Conspirators (dir. Jean Negulesco, 1944). Paul Henreid is Viktor Laszlo, Vincent Van Der Lyn, Czech Dutch resistance fighter, newly arrived in Casablanca Lisbon, and preparing to travel to Lisbon London. Yes, this movie shamelessly borrows atmosphere, cast members, and plot elements from Casablanca, and that’s fine by me. My favorite moment: Vincent ordering dinner, beginning with bread and butter and ending with real coffee. With Sydney Greenstreet, Hedy Lamarr, and Peter Lorre. ★★★★

*

Across the Pacific (dir. John Huston, 1942). It’s November 1941, and Humphrey Bogart is Rick Blaine Rick Leland, court-martialed in the States, now on his way to fight with the Chinese military, traveling via the Panama Canal. Also on board his ship: Alberta Marlow (Mary Astor) and Dr. Lorenz (Sydney Greenstreet), who bring considerable Maltese Falcon atmosphere to the proceedings — Rick even calls Astor’s character “Angel.” And look: there’s even a Japanese gunsel. Mystery and suspense in a satisfying dose of “the movies,” with the bonus of Astor and Bogart in some light comic moments. ★★★★

*

Yellow Canary (dir. Herbert Wilcox, 1943). As confusing as all get out, whatever “all get out” means. Here we’re traveling from England to Nova Scotia, on a ship carrying a British Nazi collaborator (Anna Neagle), a Polish military man (Albert Lieven), and a British intelligence officer (Richard Greene). What are they up to, and what’s Nova Scotia got to do with it? It takes a long time for things to become clear, and then the movie gets markedly better. ★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

[Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Hulu, TCM, YouTube.]