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