[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Hallmark, Max, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]
The Hunted (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1948). Four years ago, police detective Johnny Saxon (Preston Foster) arrested his girlfriend Laura Mead (Belita) for her role in a diamond heist; now she’s out of prison and telling Johnny she was innocent. But when Laura’s useless lawyer turns up dead, she’s the prime suspect. Though Foster and Belita (a British ice-skating star) are plausible as a couple joined in antagonism and attraction, they’re hardly strong enough actors to carry the movie. As in Suspense , Belita’s ice-skating is on display, though here it feels like an interruption rather than a part of the story. ★★ (TCM)
Johnny Eager (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1941). The corny title might have served as a warning: it’s an unpalatably preposterous story of Johnny Eager (Robert Taylor), a parolee who lives a double life, working as a humble taxi driver while running a gambling operation and a dog track. And get this: he falls in love with a sociology student (Lana Turner) whose father is the prosecutor who sent him to prison (awkward!). The reason to see this movie: Van Heflin’s performance as Jeff Hartnett, chain-smoking, chain-drinking, and unmistakably in love with Johnny. Best line: “My instinct was right: you couldn’t stop being a thief any more that a weasel could stop sucking chicken blood.” ★★★ (TCM)
[Van Heflin as Jeff Hartnett. Click for a larger view.]
*
Friends & Family Christmas (dir. Anne Wheeler, 2023). It’s a love story that presents the idea of the same–sex couple as utterly unremarkable, but the title is not as evasive as it might appear: the plot centers on Amelia, a corporate lawyer (Ali Liebert), and Dani, a photographer (Humberly González), two women who pretend to be dating to make their parents happy — thus friends, just friends, at least at first, and family, as the three parents (a lawyer dad, a math-prof dad, and a world-famous writer mom) are all on the scene in Brooklyn, rooting for the unbeknowst-to-them-fake relationship to flourish. Lots of artsy characters in the background, holding notebooks, wearing funny hats, talking about “travel grants for innovative thinkers,” and there’s even an Amanda Gorman look-alike poet who’s making a first attempt at fiction. Most awkward element in the story: the fathers’ creepily inordinate curiosity about their daughters’ romantic lives. Goofiest scene: dancing and paper lanterns, so thank you, Hallmark. ★★★ (H)
*
Guest in the House (dir. John Brahm, 1944). A superior psychodrama starring Anne Baxter as Evelyn Heath, a young woman coming to visit her fiancé’s family. Once embedded in the household, Evelyn begins to undermine familial harmony, pitting family member against family member, sowing doubt, fear, and jealousy everywhere. Baxter’s performance here is a clear precursor to her work in All About Eve. With Ralph Bellamy, Jerome Cowan, Margaret Hamilton, Aline MacMahon, and Ruth Warrick. ★★★★ (YT)
*
The Secret Place (dir. Clive Donner, 1957). A suspenseful, deeply human story of a diamond heist gone wrong. At the center, the friendship of a solitary boy (Michael Brooke) and a beautiful newsstand attendant (Belinda Lee). Strong overtones of The Asphalt Jungle (plans and snags), Rififi (a nearly silent heist), and The Window (a boy in peril). The travels of the stolen diamonds add a comic element, and a chase through bombed-out London buildings makes for a highly satisfying ending. ★★★★ (YT)
*
Cover Up (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1949). Dennis O’Keefe as an insurance investigator coming to an insular town to investigate what the sheriff (William Bendix) insists was a suicide. Yet there was no gun at the scene, no shell casing either. This modest movie does a fine job of casting suspicion in many directions, with the who of the whodunit uncertain until the very end. With Barbara Britton, Doro Merande, and Christmastime. ★★★ (TCM)
*
Backfire (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1950). A superior noir, getting one more star than the last time I watched it. The seemingly unrelated pieces of the puzzle end up fitting together perfectly: Bob, a hospitalized vet (Gordon MacRae); Julia, the nurse who’s fallen in love with him (Virginia Mayo); Steve, an Army pal who goes missing (Edmond O’Brien); Ben, another Army pal who runs a mortuary (Dane Clark); and Lysa, a mysterious visitor to the hospital (Viveca Lindfors). The story unfolds in a series of flashbacks (compare The Killers) as Bob’s search for his missing pal comes to a wild conclusion. Daniele Amfitheatrof’s score is even wilder, often sounding like two scores played at once. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
No Time to Kill (dir. Tom Younger, 1959). The movie begins with Johnny Greco (John Ireland) breaking into an watchman-patrolled office building somewhere in Sweden and planting a device to make it appear that someone’s committed suicide, and then he hangs around in the building — huh? And the movie goes downhill from there. I expected a short late noir, and the movie was indeed short: IMDb says that thirty minutes were cut from the American release, so no wonder it’s incoherent. The single star acknowledges that this movie at some point was something better. ★ (YT)
*
Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chögyam Trunga Rinpoche (dir. Johanna Demetrakas, 2011). My intermittent curiosity about cult leaders and their followers led me to this documentary. What I found is a propaganda piece exalting Trungpa, a Buddhist teacher (1939–1987) with an extraordinary backstory (escape from Tibet), who drank, smoked, wore three-piece suits, sexually abused women and girls, founded the Naropa Institute, created his own pseudo-military guard, and died of cirrhosis. Here’s just one piece to read about Trungpa and his legacy. This loving tribute to Buddhism as fascism joins When We Were Bullies in getting no stars from me. (YT)
*
Maestro (dir. Bradley Cooper, 2023). I wondered if this portrait of Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) — and his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) would dwell only on Bernstein’s sex life. No — it’s about his personhood, in and out of his marriage and in the world of music, with Cooper and Mulligan giving great performances as partners in a difficult partnership. Extraordinary black-and-white and color cinematography by Matthew Libatique, and with the exceptions of Shirley Ellis’s “The Clapping Song,” R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and Tears for Fears’s “Shout,” all the music is written or conducted by Bernstein. ★★★★ (N)
[At home it’s best watched with subtitles, which will identify the music and clarify murky dialogue. I’m told the sound is better in theaters.]
*
The Barefoot Contessa (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954). In my movie-watching it goes with Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Two Weeks in Another Town as a movie about the movies, with the story told by multiple narrators in lengthy flashbacks à la Citizen Kane (whose screenplay was by Mankiewicz’s father Herman and Orson Welles). The story is modeled on the life of Rita Hayworth: the producer Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) finds a potential star in the form of Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), a dancer in a Spanish tavern, and propels her to stardom in three features directed by the aging, fading director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), with tragedy to follow. My favorite line: “How much simpler it would be for so many of us if Kirk Edwards had not found it necessary to look for a new face.” My other favorite line: “And once more life louses up the script.” ★★★★ (CC)
*
Brillo Box (3¢ off) (dir. Lisanne Skyler, 2016). Martin and Rita Skyler, the director’s parents, bought an Andy Warhol Brillo Box in 1969 for $1000 and — an inspired decision — had Warhol sign it (in crayon) as a mark of authenticity. As the box later made its way from the Skyler house to a series of other owners, its value went up and up — up to $3,050,500 at a 2010 auction. The family dynamics add interest here: Martin saw art as a means to money with which to buy more art; Rita saw art as art and would have held on to everything; it’s unsurprising that the two are no longer married. An odd fact: the Brillo box was designed by James Harvey, a commercial artist and Abstract Expressionist painter. ★★★★ (M)
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
