Easy to Love

Mary Astor, Genevieve Tobin and Adolphe Menjou 
William Keighley's Easy to Love, released in early 1934, is a slim but enjoyable bedroom comedy made for Warner Brothers. Derived from Thompson Buchanan's mildly successful play As Good as New, Easy to Love is boiled down to essentials, running just over an hour. There is no attempt to open up the play, even a shot of Adolphe Menjou gazing at the moon is filmed on a soundstage. Keighley, who was just one of many talents brought west from Broadway after the advent of the talkies, is a pretty good match for the material in what was his first film as sole director. He does not have the sauciness or the visual invention of a Lubitsch, but he has the timing and rapport with actors of an old pro. Easy to Love is the umpteenth iteration of the continental boudoir farce. Thank the Lord it was made Pre-Code. Keighley's refinement meshes better with the material than some later films he was assigned by Warner Brothers like Each Dawn I Die
Lobby card for the black and white Easy to Love
The film stars Genevieve Tobin, usually a supporting player in this era, as a rich wife with a straying husband. Hubby is played by Menjou who fits the role perfectly. He is dallying with his wife's best friend (Mary Astor) who is stringing along Edward Everett Horton. In turn, Horton is besotted with Tobin. Of course, after Tobin pretends to be making time with Horton, she provokes Menjou' jealousy which leads to the inevitable conclusion that upholds wedded bliss and the double standard. 
The ensemble playing of the romantic quartet
is exemplary and there are nice supporting turns by Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert. Orry-Kelly's outfits are a plus. I don't like Ms. Tobin's outfit in the top photo, but swooned over Ms. Astor in a halter top. I did not care for the subplot of Tobin's daughter and her beau, but Easy to Love is enjoyable fluff that is easy to like. Easy to Love and One Hour With You are the best showcases for Ms. Tobin's talents. She married Keighley in 1938 and, soon after quit show biz. 

Revenge

Matilda Lutz
Coralie Fargeat's Revenge, her first feature film from 2017, is a gory and effective action thriller. Matilda Lutz portrays Jen, a mistress of a wealthy French man, who has a rendezvous with her lover at an isolated estate in a Moroccan game reserve. Jen's lover is meeting up with two buddies to go hunting, but things do not go as planned. Jen is raped and abused by the three men and, after a fall from a cliff, is left for dead. However, she is very much alive and bent on, yes, revenge. The film eschews plausibility and the characterizations verge on the one dimensional, but Revenge is a tautly constructed film with palpable energy. Fargeat's technical gifts are very much in evidence. Her framing of the action is always interesting and her use of sound, whether it is Mozart, techno or silence, effective.

Fans of Fargeat's second feature, The Substance, will find that her debut has much in common with her sophomore feature. Guillaume Bouchède gulping down of a candy bar as he watches Jen being raped is of a piece with Dennis Quaid's loud mastication of prawns in The Substance. Both films portray men as greedy animals focused wholly on their personal consumption. Predators circling each other's trail. Body horror is a major element in her two features. All four characters in Revenge endure excruciating physical ordeals and Fargeat's camera never flinches. Those looking for nuance and humanist uplift should pass Revenge by, but hardened action fans will enjoy the ferocious carnage. Each of her feature films display Fargeat's talent and craftmanship. It remains to be seen whether her reductive view of humanity will gain depth in time. 

Wrong Move

Rüdiger Vogler and Hanna Schygulla
Wim Wenders' Wrong Move, from 1975, was the second of three road movies Wenders made during the 70s starring Rüdiger Vogler. It was Wenders first color feature and part of his longtime collaboration with the writer Peter Handke. Handke based the film on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, a seminal bildungsroman, but Handke just uses Goethe's premise as a springboard for a young man's journey from through West Germany. The film opens with aerial shot of Mr. Meister's home town of Boppard. Various modes of conveyance are used in the picture by the characters and serve as motifs for the director: trains, subways, ferries, bikes, autos. The film's most typical shot is a dolly of two characters walking and talking, through squares, streets, hill, and dale. The late great Robby Müller's plein air cinematography gives the characters room to breathe and spout philosophical reveries. It has an unfussy elegance to it that helps put over the empathy with which Wenders regards his characters.

We first encounter Wenders' Wilhelm Meister regarding the town square of Boppard from his window. He is dressed in bourgeoise fashion and lolls about his room listening to the Troggs in a mood of sullen despair. He breaks his windows and his complacency in an angry fit and draws blood, in the film's first too obvious instance of the use of blood as a symbol of German collective guilt. Mama has had enough and though she says she loves Wilhelm's "unrest and discontent" (Thanks Mom!), she says he must leave home in order to gain the experience he needs to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. Wilhelm bids a curt and unromantic adieu to his girlfriend. Significantly, she, like the other two women who become enamored with the diffident Wilhelm through the course of the film, is in a guise and not playing her "real" self. Wenders gives the great Lisa Kreuzer a magnificent entrance, doffing her wig and exposing her true self to her feckless lover before Wilhelm departs on his peripatetic journey. Then she is lost to us and Wilhelm.

Wenders throws at his audience, a la Godard, a host of cultural nods during the course of his hero's sentimental education: Flaubert, Faulkner, The Kinks, Bob Dylan, Straub-Huillet, Schiller, Beethoven, Eichendorff. However, these allusions are discarded as, over the course of the film, Wilhelm travels with a band of misfits who are attracted to his unassuming charisma. They all have their stories and their dreams, which they recount, but it is their unvarnished humanity which ultimately shakes Wilhelm out of his solipsism, a little. In this, Wenders is greatly helped by his most professionally lauded and accomplished cast thus far. Vogler was already an axiom of Wenders' cinema and, expectedly, fits snugly. Hanna Schygulla, taking a break from the S and M fables of Fassbinder, is at her most beautiful and touching. Though I admit there is more than a bit of masochism in her character, an actress who falls for the remote Wilhelm. Hans Christian Blech, Peter Kern, and Ivan Desny all offer memorable vignettes as varyingly toxic examples of German masculinity. All of the actors help make Handke's high falutin rhetoric remain anchored instead of floating off into the clouds.
Vogler and Nastassja Kinski
Nastassja Kinski, making her film debut, is another kettle of fish entirely. Kinski plays a Lolitaesque mute, part of a transient grifting duo. She thinks Wilhelm is the cat's pajamas and nuzzles up to him whenever she can. Kinski has an abortive nude romantic scene with Vogler (she was twelve or so) and while some may tut-tut, I found Wenders ambivalence towards adolescent sexuality refreshing and not exploitive. Certainly, Kinski's lack of dialogue helps makes this one of her most convincing performances.

All in all, the cockeyed dourness of Wrong Moves makes me see why it is the most obscure of Wenders' road trilogy. The coming to account of a character with his Nazi past struck me more as a sign of artistic pretension than insight, but, on the whole, the people we meet in Wrong Move, are interesting and evocative. It is the tender regard that Wenders treats even his blackest characters that redeems the sometimes feckless journey of this film.