[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]
Some Kind of Heaven (dir. Lance Oppenheim, 2020). Before watching this documentary, I knew The Villages only as the place in Florida where old white people (one yelling “White power!”) were riding around on golf carts with Trump** banners last year. No politics in this picture of things, only dances, pickleball, cheerleading, margaritas, acting classes, and the enforced cheerfulness and shadowy sadness of life in a vast retirement community. The movie focuses on four people: Anne and Reggie, a married couple beset by unusual problems; Barbara, a widow trying to reengage with the social world; and Dennis, a sketchy nomad in search of a “classy lady” with money. The artful storytelling and surreal cinematography make it easy to forget that this movie is indeed a documentary. ★★★★
*
My Scientology Movie (dir. John Dower, 2015). Journalist Louis Theroux travels to Los Angeles and beyond to investigate the world of Scientology. With — surprise — no cooperation from the organization, he interviews ex-Scientologists, finds himself followed and surveilled, and casts actors to recreate scenes from life on the inside, with expert help from former Scientology executive Mark Rathbun. The result is both hilarious and scary, and much more than a stunt: the violence and obedience in the reenactments suggest the world of the Milgram experiment. The Scientology model — us vs. them, Scientology alone can fix it — seems like a rehearsal for contemporary American authoritarianism. ★★★★
*
Terror by Night (dir. Roy William Neill, 1946). Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) are on a train to Scotland, with Holmes guarding an enormous diamond, the Star of Rhodesia. When it’s stolen, everyone in their car is under suspicion, with much peeking out of compartments before pulling the curtains shut. Harmless fun, aside from the references to Rhodesia and India and the dissing of curry. But where did the diamond’s owner, Lady Carstairs, go? ★★
*
The Unfaithful (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1947). When husband Bob, a builder (Zachary Scott), is away on business, Chris (Ann Sheridan) kills an intruder in the house. But who was the dead man really, and what danger does his corpse pose for Bob and Chris’s marriage? This movie seems to have been doing important cultural work, inviting its audience to consider the virtues of compassion and forgiveness in the wake of wartime infidelities. Lew Ayres shines as Larry, the lawyer, bachelor (hmm), and friend who gives Bob and Chris good counsel. ★★★★
*
Johnny Belinda (dir. Jean Negulesco, 1948). Lew Ayres again, as Robert Richardson, an idealistic doctor in rugged Nova Scotia who seeks to help Belinda MacDonald, a young deaf woman (Jane Wyman), learn to communicate by reading lips and signing. There will be much sorrow before Belinda finds a voice and freedom. A poignant drama of disability, patriarchy, and justice. Great performances from Ayres, Wyman, and Charles Bickford, and stark painterly cinematography by Ted McCord. ★★★★
*
In This Our Life (dir. John Huston, 1942). John Huston’s second film, quite a contrast to the first and third (The Maltese Falcon and Across the Pacific). This one’s a melodrama and a half, with Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland as the daughters of a once-great tobacco grower, and George Brent and Dennis Morgan are the men in their lives. Two guesses as to which daughter is the evil one. With blatant racism, hit-and-run driving, a veiled suggestion of incest, and emotional manipulation galore. ★★★★
*
Highway Dragnet (dir. Nathan Juran, 1954). A hitchhiking veteran and murder suspect (Richard Conte) takes up with a photographer (Joan Bennett) and her model (Wanda Hendrix). A vaguely Detour-like premise, some fine campy dialogue, and a preposterous ending. Watch for Murray Alper as yet another truck driver, and Reed Hadley, the distinctive narrative voice of several semi-documentary films. Startling to see Bennett, whom I know only from ’40s starring roles, in these low-budget surroundings. ★★
*
His Kind of Woman (dir. John Farrow, 1951). The beginning is reminiscent of Out of the Past, as an elite criminal cabal enlists gambler Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum) in a mysterious scheme. The middle is reminiscent of Casablanca, with assorted characters drinking and gambling in a Mexican resort town as we wait for the scheme to unfold (Milner even helps a man win back his money at cards, earning a kiss from the man’s wife). In the final forty-five minutes the movie comes alive, turning into a giddy, lunatic spectacle (as dictated by RKO owner Howard Hughes): Milner is beaten and whipped by the bad guys, and a swashbuckling actor sojourning at the resort (Vincent Price) dons a cape, tosses off bits of Shakespeare, and leads the real-life effort to save him. I must note that Jane Russell is absent from nearly all of those forty-five minutes. ★★★★
*
Northanger Abbey (dir. Jon Jones, 2007). Felicity Jones and Carey Mulligan are wonderful as naive, fanciful Catherine Morland and wilier Isabella Thorpe. The adaptation’s emphasis though falls on externals: beautiful clothes and a castle. The shifts between English reality and Gothic fantasy are too often reminiscent of Wishbone — and I love Wishbone. But I think Catherine’s explorations of Northanger should run more along the lines of, say, Hitchcock’s Rebecca. ★★★
*
’Till We Meet Again (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1940). Love and mortality and a mysterious cocktail. Joan (Merle Oberon), a fatally ill woman touring the world, and Dan (George Brent), a criminal on the run, meet in a Hong Kong bar and are soon involved in a shipboard romance. Also aboard is the lawman (Pat O’Brien) who nabbed Dan as he left the bar and is bringing him back to San Francisco, where he’s to be executed. Now I want to see the pre-Code version, One Way Passage (dir. Tay Garnett, 1932), with William Powell and Kay Francis. ★★★★
[The Paradise is a genuine cocktail, but it bears no relation to the drink in the movie, which mixes Cointreau and Pernod in a glass with a sugared rim.]
*
The Emoji Story (dir. Ian Cheney and Martha Shane, 2019). The perfect documentary length, eighty minutes, all about the history of emojis and the process of getting an emoji candidate approved by the Unicode Consortium. Of particular interest to me: the comments by linguists on the ways in which emoji have been repurposed, both semantically and syntactically. I was surprised though not to hear someone cite “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” as the limited symbol language of emojis drives home Wittgenstein’s point (see, for instance, in the recent past, uniformly white faces and limited roles for women and girls in emojis). I wish there’d been more detail about the work of designing an emoji and the rigor of the application process — and some explanation of why the only emoji for guitar is an electric instrument (so wrong!). ★★★
*
Cluny Brown (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1946). The Lubitsch touch indeed, in his last completed film, a love story of two eccentrics, Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones), a plumber’s niece who can’t keep away from pipes, and Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer), a philosopher-humanist who’s fled the Nazis for England. The screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Elizabeth Reinhardt teems with vaguely sexual suggestions, non sequiturs, and sweet comedy. Special recognition to Richard Haydn as the village chemist. “Squirrels to the nuts!” ★★★★
Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)
[Sources: Criterion Channel, Hulu, TCM, YouTube.]
