Life After Beth, Dark of the Sun, Sweet Charity

The first of many paeans to Aubrey Plaza

After disliking Jeff Baena's The Little Hours, I watched his earlier zombie comedy Life After Beth with trepidation, but found it worth a few chuckles. Baena seems more at home in a contemporary setting than grappling with Boccaccio. Aubrey Plaza and John C Reilly are the standouts amongst a fine cast.

Jack Cardiff's Dark of the Sun is an above average action flick from 1968. Rod Taylor, Jim Brown and Yvette Mimieux are on hand dealing with rebellion, racism and diamonds in the post-colonial Congo. Mimieux was using too much bronzer, but ably handles a trauma scene. Brown was a performer who understood his limitations and offers an effective take here.  This may be Taylor's best performance. He makes you almost believe the half baked themes of friendship and honor the film tries to evoke.

Cardiff is hardly a revelatory director, but knows where to plant a camera. Dark of the Sun unfolds logically, is well paced and makes good use of its setting. The film is little more than a mishmash of The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare. However moronic the dialogue, the film never flags. Novelist Wilbur Smith penned quite a few novels of African based hokum that were made into movies, including the equally anachronistic and underrated Shout at the Devil.

Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity, his film directorial debut, is largely a disaster. Fosse does not always know where to place his camera as yet. Only the club numbers and backstage scenes work, mostly because Fosse can frame his inventive choreography theatrically with a proscenium effect. The out of doors sequences utilizing urban locations flop like dying fish. Most baffling is the use of zoom dissolves to punctuate each verse of the opening number: truly migraine inducing. The repeated use of freeze frames is also mind boggling. Shirley MacLaine was a mite too old to be doing her gamin schtick, so this has the feel of a last hurrah.

In all fairness, this was a difficult transitional time for musicals and Sweet Charity is better than some of the real turkeys of the era: such as Camelot, Paint Your Wagon, Dr. Doolittle and Lost Horizon. The lifting of the production code and the dominance of rock and roll made the genre seem old hat. Fosse would do much to bring the musical into the new era with Cabaret and All that Jazz, but even these relative successes strain credulity with their dramatic sequences. The dire twosome of Lenny and Star 80 attest to Fosse's deficiencies as a dramatist. For a better musical from the era, try Vincente Minelli's On A Clear Day You Can See Forever.