Squeal

Algars Vilims and Kevin Janssens

Aik Karapetian's Squeal, currently streaming on Tubi, is the most interesting and impressive film I've seen since Sam Raimi's Send Help. Squeal received no theatrical release in the US and has generated little critical scrutiny. The reasons for this are obvious. While only superficially a horror film, a foreigner is chained up inside a pig barn a la Hostel, there is enough porcine viscera on display to seemingly disqualify the picture from serious attention. Also what kind of publicity can a film directed by an Armenian set in Latvia and populated by its denizens receive. However, Squeal is a deceivingly complex allegory, chock full with allusions, that seems to me one of the best films released in 2021.    

Belgian actor Kevin Janssens plays Samuel, a visitor to Latvia who we first encounter driving that country's back roads searching for his long lost father. He accidentally strikes a pig in the road, who will prove to be his guide on this hero's journey, and then he encounters a dour local woman named Kirke (Laura Silina). She beckons him to seek shelter at the pig farm she runs with her aged father (a splendidly sulphureous Aigars Vilims). She feeds Samuel and plies him with homemade vodka and when he awakes the next morning, he finds that he is an enchained prisoner living in a pigsty. After a few obligatory beatings, Kirke and her father are able to convince Samuel to help out by performing the most odious chores on the farm. Kirke, who has learned some English from her dead mother, is able to converse with Samuel and they tentatively bond. However, Samuel is coveted by two neighboring elders while their grotesque charge (a stunning Normunds Griestins), Jancuks, wants to take Kirke for his own. Complications ensue until Samuel, briefly, gains his freedom with the help of the magically realistic pig; a pattern that repeats.

Laura Silina

I don't want to dwell too much on the plot because, despite its fabulistic nature, Squeal has a few surprises in store that I don't want to divulge. One way to interpret the film is as a political allegory like Animal Farm. Though both works posit pigs as the lumpen proletariat, Squeal is not about the Russian Revolution. Instead it functions as an allegory about resistance to and assimilation of immigrants in modern day Europe. Samuel is initially derided and vilified as a "foreigner" by the locals. However, because of his physical prowess, Samuel earns the respect of the rural folk. By film's end he has been assimilated into the community, marrying and impregnating Kirke. The film never descends into mere allegory because of the multi-dimensionality of the characters and performances. All the leads are superb. Mr. Janssens, who is chained and naked for the first third of the film, gives one of the best physical performances I've seen in some time. His combination of brawniness and vulnerability reminded me of Viggo Mortensen's performances in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. The film avoids a fairy tale ending as Samuel spies the magical pig who has aided him leaving the farm for a life of freedom. He wonders if he is better off enjoying the tyranny of domesticity or the liberty of the rootless. It illustrates the binary posited by the great writer Dave Hickey: is he a pirate or a farmer?

The other aspect of this intriguing film that I want to touch on are its allusions to Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, another tale of an outsider and his troubling assimilation into European society. Both films employ an ironic and omniscient narrator. The musical theme played during two key scenes between Kirke and Samuel is one of the two love themes employed in Barry Lyndon: the Irish folk tune "Women of Ireland". The scene where Kirke serves Samuel a meal mirrors the one in which Redmond Barry is seduced by a comely German woman. The twist in Squeal is that the meal is a honey trap. A later scene between Kirke and Samuel also offers a variation on the scene in which Barry attempts to locate a piece of cloth in the bodice of his kissing cousin. Furthermore, a scene in which Samuel rescues Kirke's father after he is shot during a fracas calls to mind Barry rescuing his injured commanding officer in the Kubrick film. I feel that the allusions are neither obscure nor gratuitous, but add to the texture of a magnificent film that unspools in a scant 85 minutes. 

Hell Harbor

Lupe Vélez

Henry King's Hell Harbor is a raucous melodrama that belies King's later reputation as a staid and stodgy yarn spinner. The 1930 film is a vehicle for Lupe Vélez and was one of the last gasps of Inspiration Pictures which had been formed by King, Charles H Duell, and Richard Barthelmess in 1921 to make Tol'able David.  Vélez plays Anita Morgan who has lived all her life in a small port city on an unnamed Caribbean island yearning for something bigger and more exciting. Her father (Gibson Gowland), a descendent of the pirate Henry Morgan, is a brute who wants to barter her off to an unscrupulous and repellent moneylender (Jean Hersholt). Anita's deus ex machina is an American sea captain played by the forgettable and forgotten John Holland.

As you can tell from the cursory description, the plot of Hell Harbor is no great shakes. It was cobbled together by at least three screenwriters from the novel Out of the Night by Rida Johnson Young. Young wrote over thirty plays and musicals and is best known for writing the book and lyrics to Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta; not my jam, really. However, with the exception of Mr. Holland, the cast of Hell Harbor is continually interesting. Where else can you see the two male leads of Greed reunited and as venal as ever. Before she became a punchline in films like Mexican Spitfire, Vélez was an appealing and beguiling leading lady. She provides much needed spunk and and charm to this flick. Goofy comic relief is provided by two dependable veterans: Harry Allen and Al St. John. King's direction sometimes seems crude and haphazard, but there are moments of sublime lyricism, too. Rondo Hatton appears as a bouncer.

The Cabin in the Cotton

Richard Barthelmess and Bette Davis           

Michael Curtiz's The Cabin in the Cotton is one of the more under rated American films of 1932. This Warners/First National flick is one of many pictures about rural Americana released after the salad days of Griffith and Ince, but before the fateful Variety headline Hix Nix Stix Pix. The Cabin in the Cotton is set amidst the cotton fields of the American South and is based on a 1931 novel by Harry Harrison Knoll. The adaptation was by Paul Green, a then noted, now forgotten playwright who won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Abraham's Bosom. Green, who was leftist enough to collaborate with Kurt Weill and sleep with Lotte Lenya, amplifies the portrait of class warfare present in the novel. The film has a frankness about class issues that would be remarkable even if the film was released to today.

When the film commences, the main character, Marvin Blake (Richard Barthelmess), is the teenaged son of tenant farmers working the cotton fields owned by Lane Norwood (Berton Churchill). Marvin is trying to better himself by going to school when his plans are upended by his father's sudden death. Norwood agrees to pay for Marvin's continued schooling, if he will work for Norwood after he gets his degree. Marvin ends up running Norwood's general store and keeping the books for him. However, Norwood has an ulterior motive for his kindness to Marvin. His tenant farmers, who resent Norwood for the usurious loans he has saddled them with, have been pilfering cotton and other goods from Norwood and he wants Marvin to rat on them. In turn, the tenant farmers want Marvin to use his smarts to sell their ill-gotten cotton. Marvin's plight is mirrored by the love triangle he finds himself in. The other two points being Betty (Dorothy Jordan), the earnest daughter of a tenant farmer, and Madge (Bette Davis), the saucy daughter of Norwood. After the tumult of melodramatic events, including a lynching and a fire, a kindly district attorney and Marvin are able to negotiate a truce between the farmers and the landowners.

The Cabin in the Cotton is strictly a backlot film. Painted backdrops and rear projection documentary footage are utilized to give the illusion of the outdoors. That is just as well, because Curtiz has always struck me as a director who is not really interested in portraying nature for its own sake. He is more at home in portraying the tangle of human relationships (most successfully in Casablanca) and The Cabin in the Cotton's scenario gives him ample opportunity to etch ambiguous motivations. Berton Churchill's Norwood is your typical Churchill performance, that of a bloviating and selfish fat cat. Yet, not all of the landowners are portrayed in the same light. Likewise, not all of the tenant farmers in the film are paragons of virtue. Some are as venal as Norwood and the efforts of such legendary stock players as Russell Simpson and Henry B. Walthall make them come to life. Curtiz's signature motif in the film are close-ups of hands, pushing and pulling, grabbing and entreating as a symbol of emotional manipulation. Another of Curtiz's coups in the film is the memorable staging of two dance sequences. The farmers' dance is to old time fiddle music as they do the Virginia Reel to Turkey in the Straw and The Girl I Left Behind Me. Norwood, after prodding by Madge, hires a black (or "yella" as one hick describes them) band from Memphis who play that new fangled jazz music. At one point, the band is instructed to play a "peckerwood wiggle", which mocks the poor folks.

Barthelmess, who was a big silent star, was nearing the end of his career as a leading man. At 37, he is too old to play his character. He never had the greatest amount of range, but I think his closed in performance, an augury of his embittered take in Only Angels Have Wings, is appropriate for the role. His character is a study in vacillation and Barthelmess is able to convey this. Ms Jordan's character is so anodyne that she hardly registers at all. The opposite is true of Ms. Davis who gives an outstanding, indeed star making, performance. This is the film in which she delivered the immortal line, "I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair."

Davis plays a fun loving minx without a trace of censoriousness. Her Madge is a gloriously natural creature, never ashamed to flirt, pet, or get turned on.