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| Mirjami Kuosmanen |
Erik Blomberg's The White Reindeer is a 1952 Finnish fairy tale film set in a gorgeously glacial Lapland. Mirjami Kuosmanen stars as a Sami maiden cursed with a legacy of pagan gods and witchcraft. The horror elements of the film are mild and predictable, but the ethnographic documentary aspects are stunning in their beauty. There is a little animal cruelty, reindeer are lassoed and wrassled like steers, but children would be entranced by the sequences featuring the reindeer both in the wild and harnessed to sleighs for races. Currently streaming on Tubi.
Robert Day's The Initiation of Sarah is a mildly horrific exploitation film made for ABC television in 1978. The direction is indifferent and the story is a Stephen King ripoff: mostly Carrie and the maze out of The Shining. Kay Lenz stars as a college freshman with telekinetic powers who gets involved in sorority shenanigans. The California Institute of Technology locations are attractive and the cast is way above average. Ms. Lenz offers a sensitive performance and Morgan Fairchild is delightful as the head mean girl on campus; a role that led to her being typecast forever as a conniving bitch. I also enjoyed the efforts of Tisa Farrow, Shelley Winters, Tony Bill, Kathryn Crosby, Morgan Brittany, Robert Hayes, and Talia Balsam. What a cast for a throwaway piece of crap!
François Ozon's When Fall is Coming is an ironic melodrama set in Burgundy and spanning a decade or so. The tone is subdued, especially for Ozon, and autumnal. The focus is more on a decades long friendship between two seniors (Hélène Vincent and Josiane Balasko) than on the more feckless younger generation. The film contains three deaths, sins of the past, poison mushrooms, and a ghost. I could have done without the ghost but found When Fall is Coming droll and arresting. The cast is sublime and the production design, costumes, and cinematography unostentatiously gorgeous.
Howard Bretherton and William Keighley's Ladies They Talk About, from 1933, is a subpar Barbara Stanwyck vehicle from the Pre-Code era. The plot, in which mob moll Stanwyck falls for milquetoast evangelist Preston Foster, is tommyrot with one of the worst finales I've ever seen. Ladies They Talk About was originally a play, but passed through the hands of many scribes before reaching the screen: too many cooks, etc. The chemistry between Stanwyck and Foster is nil, but at least Stanwyck ends up in prison, San Quentin, twenty minutes into this 69 minute flick. The prison depicted is the cushiest jail I've ever seen in an American film, it even has a beauty parlor. Stanwyck is well cast and wonderful, but the picture is haphazard, veering from crude to punchy. This is one weird film. Lillian Roth is a welcome sight as Stanwyck's best bud in stir. She even gets to warble a love song to a studio portrait of Joe E. Brown, then a Warners contract player. The picture's racial humor is particularly offensive.
Kogonada's A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a miss, but not the debacle some have declaimed. Kogonada's Bressonian distance doesn't ever mesh with the twee romantic fantasy penned by Seth Reiss. I loved Benjamin Loeb's cinematography and the performances of Kevin Klein, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Hamish Linklater, and Lily Rabe. Rabe, who is 42, plays the mother of Margot Robbie, age 35. The appeal of Robbie continues to elude me. Colin Farrell's charming performance is the reason to see this flick, particular when he gets to relive his character's high school performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
John Sturges' The Law and Jake Wade, from 1958, is an average Western from MGM. Surges handles the action scenes well, particularly the opening in which top billed Robert Taylor busts old pal Richard Widmark out of jail. Robert Surtees' cinematography makes stunning use of the Death Valley exteriors. The production design stands out, especially the ghost town in the finale where a bag of loot is buried. However, the script is an assemblage of cliches. Studio shots mesh poorly with magnificent exteriors. Widmark is outstanding, as are Robert Middleton, Henry Silva, and DeForst Kelly. Unfortunately, Robert Taylor is a black hole at the center of this picture. Any Western associated leading man would have been better, but he was MGM's (aging) boy.
Claude Sautet's Max et les ferrailleurs (Max and the Junkmen) is a genuine sleeper, a film that lingers. Max (Michel Piccoli) is a divorced robbery detective with a wintry heart who is getting heat from his superiors. He needs to take down a crew and, to his dubious fortune, finds a patsy in the person of an old Legionnaire buddy named Abel (Bernard Fresson). Abel and his small time hood pals strip precious metals from abandoned buildings and construction sites in the suburb of Nanterre. However, Abel has a prostitute girlfriend named Lily (Romy Schneider) who turns tricks in Paris and thinks Abel should ditch his penny ante career. Max becomes fixated on her. Posing as a wealthy banker, Max manipulates Lily into convincing Abel that a local bank is easy pickings. Things end badly for all concerned in this 1971 flick.
Max... is a low key, almost humdrum police procedural. It is more of a character study than an action film. The Nanterre cafe that serves as the clubhouse for Abel's gang is dappled with the pop colors of the era. The police stations are a putrid blue, grey, green. Max's fake love nest, a study in beige. The characters' cigarettes are matched, also: Marlboro for Abel, Kool for Lily, Gitanes, bien sûr, for Max. The story all told in a flashback as distant as Max who prefers to tinker with clocks instead of schtupping Lily. Sautet may not be a master, but he directed many fine films and has received insufficient attention in the anglophone world.
