The Housemaid

Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried

Paul Feig's The Housemaid, adapted by Rebecca Sonnenshine from the best seller by Freida McFadden, is a superior thriller, easily Feig's best film since A Simple Favor. As in that film, Feig is able to draw out the class and feminist themes in the material without distracting his audience from the technical pleasures of the yarn. The two leads, Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried playing, respectively, maid and employer, have rarely been better. The film has a strong ensemble with Brandon Sklenar, Elizabeth Perkins, Michele Morrone, and Indiana Elle all offering good turns. Feig delivers a well judged and taut thriller that is one of the least flabby Hollywood flicks of 2025.

The Housemaid was a hit, but I think it is the type of trashy seeming commercial product that is underrated by critics and the Academy. Part of this also is due to the fact that this is a "women's picture", the kind of picture that has always tended to get dismissed critically as such even when they were directed by John Stahl and Douglas Sirk. However, The Housemaid has as much to say about the way we live now as One Battle After Another does. One thread I'll pull is the film's invocation of Barry Lyndon, seemingly a distinctly different flick. However, the thematic concerns between the films are quite similar: namely the marshaling of domination via political, class, and sexual means. Like Jack Torrance in The Shining, the male monster of the id in The Housemaid is reduced to a frothing beast trapped in the labyrinth of his own design. 

Time of Roses

                 Ritva Vepsä                   

Risto Jarva's Time of Roses, from 1969, is a curious Sci/Fi mystery from the Finnish director. The film had a New York release in 1970, but has gone largely unseen in the US since. The folks at Dead Crocodile have rectified this situation by releasing a spiffy looking disc. The film is set in the far off future of 2012 and concerns a documentary filmmaker named Raimo played by Arto Tuominen. Raimo is obsessed with a long deceased model named Saara (Ritva Vepsä) whose life was embroiled by scandal. Raimo is further intrigued when he encounters Saara's doppelgänger, an uninhibited nuclear engineer named Kisse, also played by Ms. Vepsä. Raimo cajoles Kisse into participating in a film about Saara, but, as viewers of Vertigo already know, the past cannot be recaptured and, thus, the film ends tragically.

Time of Roses is as uneven a film as I've seen in some time. The best parts match the sublimity of Alphaville, the cheesy bits reminded me of Logan's Run. The decor and look of the film point not to the future, but to the pop ethos of 1969; plastic furniture and all. The score is third rate, ranging from tepid cocktail jazz to a faux raga for the (fully clothed) orgy sequence. However, some of the intimations of future shock are prescient: including "mood pills", a form of the internet, cryogenics, and totalitarian surveillance. Indeed, there are genuinely moving scenes amidst the mod clutter: especially the deflating last shot and a sequence where a blind companion of Saara's touches the face of her doppelgänger.

Jarva was a politically committed filmmaker who made both documentary and fictional films. He died prematurely in 1977 at the age of 43, after the premiere of his last film The Year of the Hare, in an auto accident. Time of Roses has more than a fair share of political allegory. Kisse's comrades at the nuke plant are planning a wildcat strike and even hijack the state TV station to announce it. This despite the regime's claim that "class boundaries have been abolished." Raimo represents the detached and feckless bourgeoisie who are more interested in slugging down Scotch and practicing free love that in pursuing social justice. 

Dante's Inferno

             

Henry Lachman's Dante's Inferno is a structurally saggy vehicle for Spencer Tracy, his last film for Fox, that has some mitigating moments. This 1935 flick benefits from casting Tracy as a heel, a carnival barker who becomes an entertainment titan.Tracy was much more interesting as a rounder and a bounder, as in Up the River, than as the models of masculine virtue he was cast as at MGM. We first meet Tracy's character, Jim Carter, working as a coal stover on a cruise ship. Fired for malingering, Carter takes a debasing job, in blackface, at a carnival. That doesn't last long, but the kindly Henry B. Walthall, playing Pops the owner of the titular attraction, takes a shine to Carter and hires him as a barker. Carter excels at the job and soon has the suckers streaming to the sideshow. The fact that Pops has a comely daughter named Betty, played by Claire Trevor, helps induce Carter to stay on in the job.

Betty and Jim soon marry and, a dissolve later, have spawned a nauseatingly cute male moppet. The domestic scenes are the biggest drag in the picture, static episodes extolling domesticity and morality while Carter pursues wealth through amoral means at work. Ms. Trevor is wasted in a vanilla role and if you are a fan of her work, you know she is much better with a little sulphur. The surreal carnival scenes work much better. The sets are gaudily magnificent and Lachman employs tilted angels for surreal notes. The uses of grotesque backdrops recalls 1934's The Scarlet Empress. Cinematographer Rudolph Maté (Vampyr) employs filters, gauze, and vaseline to delirious effect.

The scope of this production is breathtaking. Not only do we get to witness the destruction of the carnival set, but there is a fire aboard an ocean liner that takes the character of Carter full circle. Before the conflagration, there is even a sizzling dance number featuring a young Rita Hayworth, then billed as Rita Cansino. However, the most memorable sequence of this over stuffed turkey is a fifteen minute wordless sequence which is meant to illustrate Walthall's sonorous reading of Dante's text. Owing much to Gustave Doré's engravings of Dante, the sequence is a supreme example of Hollywood bad taste, but at least has a sense of bold vitality. This sequence, like best parts of Dante's Inferno, harkens back to the vivacity of the late silent era in contrast to the placidity of Production Code Hollywood. 

Henry B. Walthall and Spencer Tracy