[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]
Perfect Strangers (dir. Bretaigne Windust, 1950). It’s like Brief Encounter meets jury duty, with two members of a sequestered jury (Dennis Morgan and Ginger Rogers) falling in love, but those lackluster two aren’t a reason to watch the movie. The supporting cast is, especially Harry Bellaver as a genial bailiff, Margalo Gillmore as an old snob, Thelma Ritter as a wisenheimer, and Anthony Ross as a weird lecher. Brief appearances by George Chandler (Uncle Petrie from Lassie) are a bonus. One more reason to watch: a demonstration of the arcane procedure of selecting citizens to call for jury duty, which adds a semi-documentary flavor to the opening. ★★★ (TCM).
*
Jigsaw (dir. Fletcher Markle, 1949). Franchot Tone plays a DA investigating the Crusaders, a murderous hate group recruiting followers in the big city. A glimpse of the uniformed members, a sample of their rhetoric, would have done much to make the threat vivid. Instead we get the DA and others talking about the group and the danger they represent. The one unusual thing about this movie is the parade of cameos by actors with progressive leanings: Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Marsha Hunt, Burgess Meredith, Everett Sloane. ★★ (YT)
*
The Crooked Way (dir. Robert Florey, 1949). Eddie Rice (John Payne) is just out of the hospital, a veteran with a permanent case of amnesia, but he comes to understand that he used to be Eddie Riccardi, a Los Angeles hoodlum. And a feral criminal enemy, Vince Alexander (Sonny Tufts), wants revenge. The story is sloppy: one must wonder why Vince doesn’t just have his goons make Eddie disappear. John Alton’s cinematography is the reason to watch: to borrow a phrase I invented to describe the work of another cinematographer, it’s a delirium of shadows. ★★★ (YT)
*
All Fall Down (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1962). Willart family values: a alcoholic father (Karl Malden), a mother (Angela Lansbury) whose desire for her older son is more than implied, that son (Warren Beatty), amoral, manipulative, often absent, and a cheerful, naive younger son (Brandon De Wilde) whose misconceived admiration for his big brother is boundless. Into the Willart world steps a friend’s self-described “old maid” daughter, Echo O’Brien (Eva Marie Saint), and everything goes even more haywire. A great performance from Saint, and a good one from De Wilde, but the movie is a painfully contrived mess: you know that the father is forever calling his older son “you old rhinoceros” just so that he can later say the guy’s a real rhinoceros — that is, a killer. The most unbearable thing about the movie: Beatty’s character is named Berry-Berry (like the disease, get it?), and that name is repeated over and over, with never no explanation, Berry-Berry. ★★ (TCM)
*
Armageddon Time (dir. James Gray, 2022). Circa 1980: two Queens sixth-graders, Paul (Banks Repeta) and Johnny (Jaylin Webb), the one white, Jewish, and moderately well off, the other Black and poor, strike up a friendship born of alienation and snark. The kids are wise in some ways, heartbreakingly naive in others, and their friendship is threatened by realities outside their control. With rotten teachers, inadequate parents (Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong), a wise grandfather (Anthony Hopkins), strange overtones of Huck and Jim, and a surprise appearance by Fred Trump (John Diehl). Low-key and compelling, and the best new movie I’ve seen in a long time. ★★★★ (N)
*
Nora Prentiss (dir. Voncent Sherman, 1947). High melodrama and noir, with Kent Smith as restless, married Richard Talbot, physician, and Ann Sheridan as Nora Prentiss, a nightclub singer. A chance meeting leads to an affair. So far it’s melodrama, but when Dr. Talbot is presented with the opportunity to escape his home life, the noir kicks in. Another great film from a year of wonders. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Highway 301 (dir. Andrew Stone, 1950). It’s a sad day when a movie opens with three real-life governors warning the viewer not to follow the path of the Tri-State Gang, a murderous outfit that operated in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia in the early 1930s, robbing banks, mail trucks, and military arsenals, and murdering with impunity. It’s Steve Cochran’s movie: he’s George Legenza, the leader of the gang, a psychopath who kills anyone who might complicate his work. What gives the movie greater interest: it’s a story of criminals and their wives and girlfriends, with the women — notably Virginia Grey — standing by their men, or not. Best scene: Legenza hunts Lee (Gaby Andre). ★★★★ (TCM)
*
From the Criterion Channel: Douglas Sirk Rarities
Thunder on the Hill (1951). The premise is wild: the rains have flooded Norwich and washed out a bridge, so Valerie Cairns (Ann Blyth), a murderer traveling to her execution, becomes a guest in a convent, along with her chaperones and numerous townsfolk. When a kindly, luminous nun, Sister Mary Bonaventure (Claudette Colbert), becomes convinced of Valerie’s innocence, the story begins to move. Supporting characters include the town doctor (Robert Douglas) and an addled handyman (Michael Pate). Great cinematography by William H. Daniels, with a powerful scene that must have influenced Hitchcock’s Vertigo. ★★★★
All I Desire (1953). Barbara Stanwyck plays Naomi Murdoch, a bottom-of-the-card turn-of-the-century vaudevillian who returns to her small-town husband and children after ten years on the road to see her daughter act in the senior play. The family thinks she’s a great success, but as she will tell them, “I’ve got no glory, no glamour, and bruises on my illusions.” It turns out that you can go home again, but not without facing the past you thought you’d left behind. With Richard Carlson, Marcia Henderson, Lori Nelson, and a sinister Lyle Bettger. ★★★★
The Tarnished Angels (1957). From the William Faulkner novel Pylon. It’s the Depression (though it looks like the 1950s), with air ace turned stunt pilot Robert Shumann (Robert Stack), his ill-treated parachutist wife LaVerne (Dorothy Malone), his maybe-son Jack (Christopher Olsen) his mechanic Jiggs (Jack Carson), and an alcoholic newspaperman, Burke Devlin (Rock Hudson), who’s come in search of human interest and to find out what became of Shumann. Some scenes of dangerous aviation, but the movie is a character study, with a strong contrast between Shumann’s coarse amorality (he married LaVerne on a roll of the dice) and Devlin’s gentleness. The first things Devlin does: he stops some young bullies and buys bullied Jack an ice cream cone. ★★★★
*
The Illusionist (dir. Neil Burger, 2006). It’s from Steven Millhauser’s story “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” so I wanted to love this movie without reservation. But it turns Millhauser’s story of an ascetic uber-magician into a story of imperial intrigue (Rufus Sewell as Crown Prince Leopold), cat-and-mouse with the law (Paul Giamatti as Inspector Uhl), and love (Jessica Biel as Sophie). And all the effects that are better left on the page, for a reader’s imagination to make real, are here the work of CGI. I’m adding a star for the wildly inventive ending. ★★★★ (YT)
*
Wittgenstein (dir. Derek Jarman, 1993). I realized as I watched that I had tried once before — years ago — and had given up. Karl Johnson bears an eerie resemblance to Ludwig Wittgenstein, but that’s about all I found to like about this movie, which to my mind presents a Wittgenstein without interiority, without thinking, a farcical figure making pronouncements and being met with bewilderment or sudden enlightenment (students) or amused condescension (Michael Gough as Bertrand Russell). Factoids from Norman Malcolm’s memoir — e.g., Wittgenstein the Betty Hutton and Carmen Miranda fan — are here in abundance, in one blackout scene after another. There is also a green Martian. ★ (CC)
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
