The Wonderful World of Tubi, March 2026

Greta Garbo in The Kiss

Jacques Feyder's The Kiss, from 1929, is the last, and perhaps best, silent film that Greta Garbo made for MGM. The witty script, based on a George Saville short story, was by Hanns Kräly, a frequent collaborator of Ernst Lubitsch. However, Kräly's career in Hollywood would be severely affected after Lubitsch discovered that Kräly was carrying on an affair with Lubitsch's soon to be ex-wife. Kräly soldiered on as a screenwriter, but was consigned to B pictures after 1930. The Kiss is a romantic melodrama with comic flourishes set in France. Garbo is married to an older banker, but is in love with a lawyer played by Conrad Nagle. A young swain, wonderfully played by Lew Ayres, is also infatuated with her which leads to tragic consequences. Cedric Gibbons' Art Deco sets are eye popping. So are Adrian's outfits for Ms. Garbo, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. Feyder's direction is light on its feet, resulting in a melodrama that never bogs down or loses momentum. It is a great pity that this was the only English language feature that Feyder directed in America. Highly recommended.

Joe May's Asphalt, from 1929, is an Erich Pommer production which makes me wonder if Pommer produced any poor or even mediocre films in Germany during the 1920s. Asphalt is a melodrama that combines romance and crime in Weimar Berlin. Thief Betty Amann seduces young cop Gustav Frölich. It ends badly after the requisite trysts and heists. The picture boasts extraordinary subjective POV shots and impactful close-ups. A masterpiece on par with Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Joe May's reputation declined when he was consigned to B pictures in Hollywood, but for me he is now a subject for further research.

Tubi has three musical comedies from the early 1930s, all starring Eddie Cantor, that are worth a peek. The best of the three is Roman Scandals with completely gaga musical numbers directed by Busby Berkeley. Berkeley also contributed to Whoopee!, shot in two strip Technicolor, which is bogged down by its stage bound presentation; like the film version of the Marx brothers' The Cocoanuts. The runt of this litter is Kid Millions, but it does contain wonderful turns by Ethel Merman and the Nicholas brothers. All three films were typically classy Samuel Goldwyn productions and all three films are greatly helped by Stuart Heisler's editing. Cantor was a quadruple threat talent who was already a huge star on stage and thanks to his recordings. Cantor's lineage of wisecracking smart alecks includes token goy Bob Hope and Woody Allen, though Cantor always remained a naif. He never employed a leer. Cantor proved to be good value for Goldwyn in response to the success of The Jazz Singer. Both Jolson and Cantor's film careers suffered parallel declines in the late 1930s. Scholars of the Production Code can note the difference between 1933's Roman Scandals and 1934's Kid Millions. 

Jiří Weiss' The Golden Fern is an epic Czech fantasy film from 1963. The film is shot in wide screen black and white, gorgeously lensed by Beda Batka (Marketa Lazarova, and, um, Little Darlings). The film concerns a 18th century shepherd who happens upon the titular and magical fern. A forest sprite morphs into a beautiful woman in order to retrieve the fern, but falls for the studly if arrogant shepherd. They have a brief idyll until the shepherd is pressed into service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in their latest conflict with the Ottoman Empire. While serving the Empire, the shepherd become entangled with a haughty aristocrat played by Daniela Smutná who gives the film's best performance. She is just toying with the lad, but true love is betrayed and the fern crumbles to dust. The film is uneven. Some of the action and supernatural scenes are quite clumsy, but the scenes of life in an 18th century military camp are compelling. These moments left their impact upon Kubrick's Barry Lyndon much as Jaromil Jireš' The Joke influenced Full Metal Jacket. Interested parties should check out the immaculate disc from Deaf Crocodile.

Frank Borzage's Song o' My Heart, from 1930, is Fox's attempt to concoct a vehicle for Irish tenor John McCormack. McCormack was one of the top recording stars and concert draws of the day. His repertoire ranged from traditional Irish ballads to opera. Fox paid him 500,000 clams and he liked Hollywood enough to buy an estate there. However, the film is a slipshod affair. I guess Fox figured they had already shelled out enough on this project, so every expense was spared. The story is drivel and the acting is horrid. The version on Tubi is mostly silent with 14 songs. Other, all talking, versions exist, but a 70 mm print is presumed lost forever. A half dozen of the musical numbers were taken from a recital, so this is one static picture. Featured are Alice Joyce, Maureen O'Sullivan (an Irish discovery by Borzage), John Garrick, and J. Farrell MacDonald, billed here without the J. Unless you want to see what McCormack looked like while performing, this is eminently skippable.

Even with its commercials, I can't think of a better streamer for budding cinephiles than the free, for now, Tubi. Right now you can watch scores of films by DW Griffith, John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Kenji Mizoguchi, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Ingmar Bergman, David Cronenberg, Werner Herzog, Blake Edwards, Ernst Lubitsch, etc. I think Tubi has a better lineup of classic films than any streamer, including The Criterion channel. Also check out these classics currently streaming on Tubi: Godard's Contempt, Chabrol's This Man Must Die, Brian de Palma's Sisters, Franju's Eyes Without a Face, Carol Reed's The Third Man, Dryer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, Jarmusch's Dead Man, Andre de Toth's Pitfall, GW Pabst's The Diary of a Lost Girl, Sirk's A Scandal in Paris, Zhang Yimou's Shadow, Bigelow's Point Break, Clive Donner's What's New Pussycat, Melville's Le Samourai, Rossellini's Journey to Italy, Davies' A Quiet Passion, Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA, Siegel's The Lineup, Leni's The Man Who Laughs, Tarkovsky's Solaris, Rush's The Stunt Man, Marquand's Eye of the Needle, Lynch's Eraserhead, Margarethe von Trotta's Sheer Madness, Stroheim's Greed, Borzage's A Farewell to Arms, Chaplin's The Gold Rush, Keaton's Our Hospitality, and many more. A cinematic feast awaits.

Betty Amann in Asphalt

L'Empire

Fabrice Luchini

Bruno Dumont's L'Empire is a pleasantly lunatic vision, meshing Dumont's beloved northern France settings with a science fiction parody. Two dueling extraterrestial clans seek to renew their legacy by assuming a human form and propagating in the Côte d'Opale. Mythic themes are parodied and burlesqued: rival dynasties, star-crossed lovers, and an anointed child preordained to lead the next generation. Unlike the George Lucas efforts it mocks, L'Empire offers genuine spasms of violence and sex. The aliens races are equally eager to decapitate with their light sabres and to copulate in their newly acquired human flesh. The cheekily comic couplings occur in nature, on land or sea, in landscapes worthy of Courbet.  

The two warring clans are monikered the 0s and the 1s, the building blocks of our digital age. The 0s have a spaceship that looks like Versailles. They have a patriarch (Fabrice Luchini) and resemble, in their non-human forms, merde emojis without  Gallic charm. The1s have a mother ship that resembles Reims Cathedral and resemble rays of light. Dumont is parodying the French dualism that has dominated it national discourse even before Descartes posited a mind/body split. French discourse and French humor have never really caught on in the States and L'Empire opened here with barely a ripple.

Dumont contains this film within his own cinematic universe of northern France seen before in his mini-series L'il Quinquin. As in that project, he strikes gold with youthful performers. Based on her previous work, I expected  a fierce and committed performance from Anamaria Vartolomei, but Dumont gets equally compelling work from newcomer Brandon Vileghe. Only Fabrice Luchini overdoes it, but what can you expect when Luchini is playing a character named Belzébuth. 

Crime 101

Mark Ruffalo and Chris Hemsworth

Bart Layton's Crime 101 is the most satisfying noir in some time. Layton has relied heavily, but not slavishly, on Don Winslow's sleek and superb novella. A number of critics have compared this new film to Michael Mann's Heat, but the surface similarities between the two films, both are LA based heist flicks, are simply that. Heat, like most Michael Mann films, is focused on the mythos of machismo. I revere Heat, but, frankly, that daylight robbery of the bearer bonds or whatever the hell they were is ludicrous. Now I enjoy the kinetic rush of the sequence, but it is not, in any way, a realistic portrayal of how and where to go about an armed robbery. Nevertheless, the whole tone of the film is mythic rather than realistic, so why carp. Winslow's novella and Layton's film(s) are more interested in realistic characterization than mythic figures. At the end of Heat, the cop upholds his duty and nails the perp. That is not what happens at the end of Crime 101. The cop in the Layton film knows the beast of societal justice must be fed, but he ultimately follows his own code.

Every character in Crime 101 masks his true self. This Layton makes plain in the scene in which Halle Berry goes through her daily make-up routine. One's true self is irrelevant to one's success in society. This is as true for the cop (Mark Ruffalo) as it is for the insurance agent (Ms. Berry) and thief (Chris Hemsworth). It is when these character put down the masks they have constructed for themselves that they can find a sense of commonality. The main problem I have with this movie is Chris Hemsworth. He's ok when the mask is in place, but he telegraphs his character's moments of vulnerability. Think of Brad Pitt in this role and you might see what I mean. I also felt that Nick Nolte's performance is disastrous. It was like watching Willie Mays when he played for the Mets. Otherwise, the ensemble is superbly cast and at the top of their game. Excellent work from Ms. Berry, Mr. Ruffalo, Barry Keoghan, Monica Barbaro, Corey Hawkins, Tate Donovan, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The score by Blanck Mass is spine tinglingly effective without being obtrusive.