[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Hulu, TCM, YouTube.]
A Place in the Sun (dir. George Stevens, 1951). From Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. With different leads, the story might be insufferable, but Montgomery Clift’s shiftiness, Elizabeth Taylor’s breathiness, and Shelley Winters’s neediness make for compelling drama — or, well, melodrama. Charlie Chaplin called it “the greatest movie ever made about America,” and by America, I think he meant class. Would pair well with Room at the Top or Strangers on a Train. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Crime against Joe (dir. Lee Sholem, 1956). It feels like dollar-store Hitchcock: a wrong man scenario, in which Joe Manning (John Bromfield), Korean War vet, frequent drunk, painter manqué, is suspected of killing a barroom singer. Julie London is “Slacks” Bennett, a carhop and “nice girl” who’s helping Joe find the real killer. (Joe’s mother has encouraged him to find “a nice girl.”) A class pin is the only thing that can establish Joe’s innocence — but where is it? ★★★ (YT)
*
Three Bad Sisters (dir. Gilbert Kay, 1956). One bad movie, from Bel-Air Productions, who gave us Crime Against Joe. Here John Bromfield plays Jim Norton, a pilot caught in the schemes of three sisters whose millionaire father died in a plane piloted by Norton himself. Two sisters are bad — murderous Valerie (Kathleen Hughes) and man-eating Vicki (Marla English), who says she graduated “magna cum laude from Embraceable U.” Good sister Lorna (Sara Shane) is merely desparate, as is the movie itself. ★★ (YT)
*
Flamingo Road (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1949). Joan Crawford is Lane Bellamy, a carnival dancer who ends up stranded in a southern town. Three men take an interest in her presence: an evil sheriff (Sydney Greenstreet, sweating, guzzling milk, dressed all in white), a badgered deputy sheriff (Zachary Scott), and a rich businessman (David Brian). I think of this movie as a variation on Nightmare Alley, with a carny rising in the world, only to — I’ll stop there. Great atmospherics (Ted McCord’s cinematography is a wow), but the story slides into mediocre melodrama. ★★★ (TCM)
*
From the Criterion Channel’s Myrna Loy feature
Whipsaw (dir. Sam Wood, 1935). Myrna Loy is Vivian Palmer, a jewel thief, one among many (it’s complicated). Spencer Tracy (in a role marked for William Powell) is Ross McBride, an undercover lawman who hopes that Vivian will lead him to the other thieves. The best part of this movie: a Hitchcockian interlude with Vivian and Ross posing as a married couple seeking shelter from a storm at a farmhouse, where John Qualen is a nervous father-to-be and Vivian is pressed into service as a doctor’s assistant. The banter is the closing scene is a delight, moreso because there’s no Thin Man baggage to clutter the stage. ★★★★
*
The Dropout (created by Elizabeth Meriwether, 2022). Except for William H. Macy’s fake forehead, everything about this mini-series is brilliant. As Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani, Amdanda Seyfried are a toxic power-couple, running a company built on lies, and then more lies to cover earlier lies. The human cost is staggering. The difference between Steve Jobs’s reality-distortion field and Holmes’s: Jobs made people believe they could do hard things; Holmes made people believe she was doing hard things. ★★★★ (Hulu)
*
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (dir. Alex GIbney, 2019). Every minute is compelling, and watching this documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos deepens my admiration for The Dropout, which gets everything right. An extraordinary story about credulity, delusion, greed, and lies. “You want it to be true, so badly”: Tyler Shultz, Theranos employee, whistleblower, and grandson of board member George Shultz. “This was lunacy”: Roger Parloff, journalist. ★★★★ (HBO)
*
The Secret Ways (dir. Phil Karlson and Richard Widmark (uncredited), 1965). Confusing from the get-go: in Vienna, an American mercenary of sorts, Mike Reynolds (Richard Widmark) is hired to get a Hungarian professor/revolutionary out of Hungary, but by whom? And the screen titles say “1961,” but it’s supposed to be 1956. Widmark does a fine job save for a dubious attempt at Rat Pack comedy. The atmospherics — dark streets, cavernous interiors, subterranean meeting places — add greatly, and the camerawork (Mutz Greenbaum) shows the influence of The Third Man. ★★★ (YT)
*
Smooth as Silk (dir. Charles Barton, 1946). Virginia Grey plays a rising Broadway star, engaged to a criminal-defense lawyer (Kent Taylor) and aiming for a starring role in a new play. Her attentions turn to her fiancé’s just-acquitted client, a hapless young drunk whose uncle is producing the play in which she wants to star. The bewildering thing: Grey’s character is at the center of things, but she disappears from the movie well before its end. My favorite bits: Harry Cheshire (the minister in The Best Years of Our Lives) as a loyal butler and astute drama critic. ★★ (YT)
*
The Strip (dir. László Kardos, 1951). The reason to watch this movie: great music from Louis Armstrong and and three of the All-Stars: Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, and Earl Hines (sorry, IMDb, Arvell Shaw and Cozy Cole are never on the bandstand). Mickey Rooney, playing a drummer accused of murder, tells his story in a long flashback, which fortunately includes several complete musical numbers from Armstrong, the All-Stars, and Rooney. Rooney’s approach to the drums — playing over the other musicians, not with them or under them — marks him as something of a poor man’s Buddy Rich. With William Demarest as a nightclub owner and Sally Forrest as a cigarette girl/dancer. ★★★ (TCM)
*
Fire Music: The Story of Free Jazz (dir. Tom Surgal, 2021). A compilation of archival and contemporary interviews, performance footage, photographs, and hokey visual effects. The interview segments are invaluable: Bobby Bradford’s comments on difficulty in music, for instance, or Anthony Braxton’s account of leaving for Paris with fifty dollars in his pocket and the resolve to “Play, or die.” But this documentary wanders and wanders, from one topic to another, and so many musicians are heard speaking but not playing. No Julius Hemphill, no Henry Threadgill, and the musicians of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians are given relatively little attention. ★★★ (CC)
*
Come Back, Little Sheba (dir. Daniel Mann, 1952). If all you (like me) know of Shirley Booth is television’s Hazel Burke (a character Booth called her insurance policy), this movie will be a revelation. Booth and Burt Lancaster play the Delaneys: Lola, frumpy and desperately cheerful, and Doc, a chiropractor and recovering alcoholic, partners in a dead marriage burdened with a painful history, burdened further by the arrival of a boarder, Marie (Terry Moore), college student and wild child. A poignant picture of lives in decline and the effort to make something of them still. As for the title: you’ll have to watch. ★★★★ (CC)
Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)
