The Night House

David Bruckner's The Night House is an imaginatively creepy haunted house film. Rebecca Hall is a bereaved widow whose husband of fourteen years builds her a lakeside dream house and then suddenly blows his brains out. Going through his belongings, she discovers her husband was harboring sinister secrets.

The script combines the supernatural with psychological horror. Bruckner elicits suspense from changes in perspective rather than jump scares. Hall does most of the heavy lifting in a largely silent film where she is alone on screen the majority of the time. The star of Christine, another suicide haunted film, brings some welcome mordant humor to the role. Sarah Goldberg and Vonde-Curtis Hall are solid in support. Richard Thompson's "Cavalry Cross" is effectively used as an augury of evil. The doppelganger theme is overly literalized, but The Night House is more thoughtful than most of its ilk. 
 

Tomorrow is Forever

Orson Welles and Natalie Wood

Irving Pichel's Tomorrow is Forever is an entropic melodrama from 1946. A woman's (Claudette Colbert) husband (Orson Welles) supposedly dies in World War 1, but returns twenty years later to work for her second husband (George Brent). Complications ensue. Pichel was never a very dynamic or distinctive director, but the pacing lumbers. There are too many two shots of people conversing on patio chairs. Pichel displays more animation heralding the invasion of Poland as an offscreen radio announcer than he does directing here.

In his pan in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther noted that the plot of Gwen Bristow's source novel was a rehash of Longfellow's "Enoch Arden". Of course, the central conceit goes back further, in ballads like "John Riley" all the way back to Homer. I am afraid Ms. Bristow is solely responsible for such leaden retorts as "You are not only a man, you are mankind" or "We must live for tomorrow (long Wellesian pause) because tomorrow is forever". I'm not sure even Douglas Sirk could have redeemed a film with lines like these. However, there are consolations amidst the clunkers.

I was fairly pleased with two contributors who I'm usually nonplussed about. Max Steiner's score is solid schmaltz without too much Mickey Mousing or gloop. George Brent's hairpiece sits upon his head like an ill-fitting crown, but he assays a thankless role with ease. 

This was the first screen appearance of Richard Long, a mainstay on television in my youth. He is adequate which is more than I can say of Colbert. She was more at ease in light comedy than melodrama. The role seems more tailored to Stanwyck or even Jane Wyman. Her chemistry with Welles is zilch, but that was always a dicey proposition when dealing with the wunderkind from Kenosha. What leading lady did have chemistry with Welles?  Hayworth is more object than equal in The Lady from Shanghai. Only when Welles could dominate, as in Jane Eyre, was the Romantic torch lit. The grand exception, which Welles milked, was with Micheal Mac Liammoir as his secret sharer in Othello.

Natalie Wood, relaxed and offering a passable Germanic accent as Welles' daughter, has much better chemistry with him. Indeed, there scenes together are the highlight of the film. This was Wood's first credited screen appearance. She had appeared uncredited in Pichel's The Moon is Down and liked the director, so this might help explain her facility here. Crowther thought Welles guilty of a "studied display of overacting", but he was always an easy target. I actually think this is one of his more restrained foreign accent aided performances. He is the best reason to examine this middling fare.

La Chinoise

Anne Wiazemsky with strategically placed chapeau in La Chinoise

Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, from 1967, is an bracing mix of agitprop and semiotics. Catnip to Godardophiles like myself, the dialectical didacticism of Godard's methods failed to find a mass audience. I am fittingly of two minds about this film. Scenes such as the one with Anne Wiazemsky and Francis Jeanson conversing on a train for ten minutes or so function as quick working Sominex.; despite its many subtexts. On the whole, however, I found La Chinoise to be a visually bracing lark. Who knows why the uncaged Swiss sing?

Part of what I enjoyed was the feistiness of the young cast. Jean-Paul Leaud and Juliet Berto are engaging and lively. They get to play like naughty school children. Leaud particularly excels at the improv and breaking of the fourth wall that his director demands. Wiazemsky is a beatific, yet less interesting presence. The successor to Anna Karina as Godard's lover and muse is manipulated like a marionette in La Chinoise. She certainly doesn't seem to be hard bitten enough to carry out political assassinations. It's not all her fault. In the forementioned scene with Jeanson, Godard was dictating her lines via earpiece. All it takes is a properly slanted chapeau. 

The real star of any Godard film is Jean-Luc, the mad jester himself. La Chinoise is the high water mark of Godard's attempt to extend the language of film. The subsequent Week-end, also a comedy of sorts, detonates bourgeois cinema to start anew. Soon after, Godard subsumed his personality beneath the guise of revolutionary activism. I consider the Dziga Vertov group period to be his artistic nadir, but, perhaps, retrenchment was necessary to Godard's survival and sanity. He seemed to be fusing his passion for auteurist cinema with exciting new possibilities gleaned from semiotics. He epitomizes this fusion heralded by Peter Wollen in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema; my copy has a still from Week-end on the cover. Like Icarus, Godard's fall seems inevitable in hindsight. Peut etre.

La Chinoise is chock full of signs and signifiers. In Godard's earlier films, references to other movies and literature served both as a homage to his heroes and a self-conscious, post-modern comment on the narrative's themes. In La Chinoise, the screen is filled with an array of images and sounds all juxtaposed in Brechtian fashion. It is thorough composed cinema. The attempt to create a new cinematic language is palpable. A newspaper clip with a picture of Mao quotes him as "Against the cult of the book."

Godard primarily uses the colors of the French tricolor in La Chinoise's palette and there are self-conscious references to his use of yellow and green in the film. The colors of the French flag are associated with the three elements of the revolutionary motto: liberty (blue), equality (white), and fraternity (red). The colors are used to comment on the action or inaction of the film much the way light and dark, as Stan Brakhage noted, in Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance become "poetry in the contextual rhythms of the working of the total works."💙 

However, what I most like about La Chinoise, something that disappeared in Godard's work over the next decade or so, is its humor. There is a feeling of playfulness in this film. A sense that Godard, as one of his heroes Jerry Lewis, put it, was hardly working. I was reading a piece about the film on the scholarly Marxist blogsite, Cosmonaut, that brought this home to me. Needless to say, any sense of Godard's prankishness was absent in the solid, yet humorless political analysis. As was any mention of the source of La Chinoise's "story", Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. The dour Fyodor, who like Godard had his comic side, even makes a cameo in the film when the puckish Godard has Leaud put a coin in his tin cup; a token appreciation, I suppose. 

 

The Possessed is my favorite Dostoyevsky novel. It mixes high falutin rhetoric with violence, pathos with explosions of passion, tragedy with the blackest of comedy.💚 It is not particularly adaptable and Godard did not really try to adapt it. He retains only the idea of a revolutionary cell hidden in bourgeoise society and Kirilov's suicide. If anything, La Chinoise is a burlesque of The Possessed and Maoism. Chinoise also means nonsense in French. I find more than a note of mockery in Godard's treatment of  the young Maoists and himself. He can't be fully serious when he has Wiazemsky intone, at the end, "I thought I made a giant leap forward, but it was a small step on a long march." Godard's young activists still don their rose colored glasses after reading the little red book.

La Chinoise is not wholly successful, but it contains multitudes.

💙 Stan Brakhage, film biographies, pg.56

💚 A succinct and heartfelt appreciation of the novel appears in Elif Batuman's The Possessed. Part of Batuman's success in grappling with the novel lies in her acknowledgement of what an unruly and crazed beast it is. 

Icarus

                     

Bryan Fogel's Icarus is an intriguing documentary on doping in sports. Fogel is a high level amateur cyclist who, in Super Size Me fashion, endeavors to use steroids in order to test whether it will help his athletic performance. The results are ambivalent, but his quest leads him to connect with Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of Russia's main drug detection lab. Rodchenkov seems all too eager to help Fogel mask the drugs in his urine and soon invites Fogel to his lab in Moscow.

The friendship that develops between the two men becomes the crux of the film, especially when Rodchenkov runs afoul of WADA, the antidoping organization formed to monitor athletes. Rodchenkov has information that implicates high officials in the Russian government and enlists Fogel's help in fleeing the country. Fogel gets Rodchenkov out of Russia and finds a safe house for him, fearing reprisals from Putin's henchmen.

As any casual fan of Olympic sports knows, the revelations of doping by Russian athletes is a dog bites man story. Fogel interweaves interviews, news footage, and custom made animation to tell the tale. His interchanges with Rodchenkov make this documentary stand out, but also raise issues of objectivity. From the get go, Rodchenkov seems to be a charming con man who tells people what they want to hear. I have no problem suspecting Putin and his underlings of all sorts of perfidy, the evidence is pretty clear, but Fogle suffers from tunnel vision. At the end of Icarus, Rodchenkov has forsaken his wife, children. and country in order to enter our federal witness protection program. Whether this is a just dessert is not something one can fathom from this interesting, yet murky documentary.

Wake in Fright

Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright, from 1971, is a well crafted slice of rural paranoia set in the Australian Outback. A schoolteacher on holiday gets stuck in a dingy mining town after losing his money gambling. The locals, nearly all lager louts, extend a welcome to join them in their primeval rituals: which involve binge drinking, destruction of property and senseless slaughter of the local wildlife. The film is a fairly explicit critique of so called civilized masculinity, much like films from that era such as A Clockwork Orange, Deliverance, and Straw Dogs.

Wake in Fright suffers from erratic acting. Familiar Aussie types like Chips Rafferty and Jack Thompson fit in nicely as Foster's swilling blokes, but lead actor Gary Bond is a blank. Donald Pleasence is well cast as a creepy, alcoholic doctor, but Sylvia Kay, as a nympho(!), is directed as if she were in a Roger Corman produced Poe adaptation. A spectral woman out of The Tomb of Ligeia or The Fall of the House of Usher would not be out of place in a more fanciful film, but Wake in Fright aspires to be a more existential piece. Kotcheff is able to extract a tactile sense of horror from the film's environment, but his inability to animate his players sometimes makes this film seem like it is an abstract exercise. 

On a cinematographic level, Kotcheff succeeds in evoking the Outback as a squalid Hades. The opening sequence emphasizes horizontal movement in which the protagonist makes a snail's pace through a foreboding landscape. This soon devolves into claustrophobic interior sequences in which the schoolteacher is increasingly encroached upon by the locals. The swarming, male only gambling den becomes a little hell of withing flesh conjuring a sinister homoerotic vibe that culminates in the schoolteacher being violated by the doctor.

That the protagonist returns somewhat unscathed back to his single room schoolhouse brings him full circle in what I found to be a somewhat compelling, yet ultimately pointless film. Kotcheff has made some memorable films, but seems to lack an overall vision. I think he is a tad underrated, he is not listed in David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film for example, but I will make no great claims for him. I've enjoyed The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Fun with Dick and Jane, North Dallas Forty and even Weekend at Bernie's. Wake in Fright is accomplished, but only intermittently. The kangaroo rassling sequences seem particularly ill-judged. All in all, Kotcheff ranks a bit higher on my Canadian auteur scale than Norman Jewison, but only just. 

Mandabi

Tea time in Dakar

Ousmane Sembene's Mandabi (The Money Order), from 1968, was the first African language film; specifically Wolof, a language of Gambia, Mauritania, and, in this case, Senegal. Set primarily in a Dakar shanty town, the film pictures a country dealing with the vestiges of colonialism. Senegal had gained its independence from France in 1960, but was still very much under its economic sway. The Senegalese elite retained French as its official language. Ibrahim, the protagonist of the film, receives a large money order from a nephew who is working as a street sweeper in Paris. Because he lacks proper identification or even a birth certificate, his attempts to cash the money order proves ridiculously difficult. Illiterate and not able to speak the language of Senegal's bureaucrats, Ibrahim is a lamb to the slaughter in a nation of wolves.

Mandabi is a satire of Senegal under the regime of President Senghor who, despite his academic and Socialist bona fides, was considered a lackey of France by the Senegalese Left. Sembene was certainly of that ilk. He characterized Mandabi as a denunciation of the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". Sembene had worked as a laborer and was a trade unionist before embarking on a career as a writer. (Mandabi had been published as a novella in 1965) Pivoting to filmmaking, Sembene studied at the Gorky Film Studio in Moscow. Mandabi certainly exposes the systemic corruption and greed of post-colonial Africa. Like in fellow traveler RW Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends, a sudden windfall for the protagonist brings on unwanted attention from gold diggers, creditors, and leeches.

Sembene engages in Brechtian juxtapositions of traditional African culture and modern Western influence to expose the dislocated nature of his country's culture. Senegal is bifurcated and alienated in his vision. Frilly bras and white plastic baby dolls coexist with Islamic prayers and ritualistic ablutions. Though a Marxist, Sembene eschewed socialist realism. It is Mandabi's humor and colorful parade of humanity that makes its bitter message palatable to a relatively right wing reptile like myself. The use of music in Mandabi, as in all Sembene's films, is sublime.

Almost all socio-political oriented commentators have steered clear of addressing the role of Islam in the film. Sembene certainly regards Ibrahim's polygamy with feminist irony, but the moments of prayer and devotion are handled respectfully. In contrast to the dog eat dog machinations of the daily hunt for mammon, prayer and rituals, like sharing tea, provide communitarian gatherings of solace and rapprochement amid the hubbub. These are rare moments of calm and reflection in a world containing myriad hustles. Moments like these signal that Sembene, like Jacques Tati, senses the losses to humanity resulting from modernity. Because its complexities and contradictions transcend the politics of 1968, Mandabi stands as one of that year's better films.

Quick Takes (January 2022)

Clint Eastwood's Cry Macho is pleasant entertainment. Clint romances a senora and plays straight man to children and animals. There is nary a gun fired. My feelings towards the film are almost exactly what I felt about The Mule.

Yes Day is the type of B level family comedy that Disney churned out sixty or so years ago. In fact, I believe a gag in Yes Day has been lifted directly from The Love Bug. Generally regarded by critics as mediocre, I, however, found Miguel Arteta's direction to be lively and brisk. He is an underrated talent. Yes Day is better than The Love Bug, but not as good as That Darn Cat!.

Free Guy is worse than mediocre. Numerous motifs from better films are cobbled together to pad a story aimed at today's youthful gamers. Free Guy is a deeply unchallenging film that wastes a talented cast of actors and vocal talents. Ryan Reynolds' trademark snark descends into smug schtick. The highlight of director Shawn Levy's career remains, um, Big Fat Liar. Free Guy contains the final screen appearance of Alex Trebek. 

RIP: Edward O. Wilson. Wilson recently described our civilization as being like the one in Star Wars, "we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology."

Werewolves Within is amiable, but forgettable. Milana Vayntrub and Sam Richardson, both usually in supporting roles, are likeable leads. The film resembles Tremors in its mix of comedy and horror with a dash of social commentary, but it is not as good as that 1990 film. 

The House is a trio of 30 minute stop motion animation films linked by the titular manse. More for the midnight movie crowd than toddlers, The House will reward fans of Jan Švankmajer and Blood Tea and Red String.

Tsai Ming-liang's 1998 effort The Hole is set in a crumbling apartment building that has been quarantined during a pandemic. The film combines horror, absurdist humor, and musical sequences. The musical numbers are more Pennies From Heaven than Top Hat. There is no attempt at thematic or narrative cohesion. Rather, the film channels feelings of desperation and befuddlement. Pretty apt for a pandemic, if you ask me. The performers throw themselves into their turns within Ming-liang's tightly controlled frame. Fun, if you are not allergic to art films.

The Last Duel

Matt Damon goes with the medieval mullet in The Last Duel

Ridley Scott's The Last Duel is a watchable yet unengaging epic. Not a fiasco, like Scott's Robin Hood or any number of other films with Hollywood leads assaying ye olde speech, The Last Duel avoids unintentional hilarity, but never is emotionally involving. 

The film has a three part structure similar to that of Rashomon. Both films revolve around a rape. Rashomon is a taut 88 minutes whereas The Last Duel meanders repeatedly through back stories for over two and a half hours. The film never drops dead, but could have used some pruning.

The project began as a script by its co-stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon who were inspired by Eric Jager's book. Nicole Holofcener was brought in to bring a more feminine slant to the screenplay. Jodie Comer plays Marguerite, uneasily wed to the volatile knight. Sir Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon).  Marguerite is assaulted by Sir Jean's former comrade in arms, Jacques le Gris (Adam Driver). Sir Jean decides that the only way to preserve his own dignity and, secondarily, uphold his wife's virtue, is to challenge Jacques to a trial by combat. The script narrowly skirts an ahistorical "me too" knowingness. The dialogue is not embarrassing, but never altogether believable. 

The leads, though, seem comfortable and well-cast. Adam Driver subtly brings out the brutishness of Jacques. Ben Affleck delightfully inhabits a drunken playboy. Damon's stolidity comes in handy as he offers an intelligent portrayal of stupid man. Jodie Comer is adequate. Despite Ms. Holofcener's efforts, her character barely registers. The opening sequence, where Marguerite dons endless layers of clothing, suggest how stifled the fairer sex were in the Middle Ages.

Director Scott ably captures the period atmosphere of the late 14th century. Few films have captured so well the poor hygiene of the era. Scenes of combat and battle are well handled. However, as in all but the best of Scott's films, the psychological conflicts of the characters seem secondary to the spectacle. The Last Duel is well drawn, but lacks any sense of interiority.  
 

Being the Ricardos

Being the Ricardos is another lousy movie from Aaron Sorkin. I wouldn't call it a misfire because it is what I expect from Mr. Sorkin and it is a little better than The Trial of the Chicago 7. Office politics and the behind the scene machinations of making a television show are in Sorkin's wheelhouse, but the film is over freighted with cultural significance. For Sorkin, each and every moment is the time that tries men's souls. 

Lucille Ball's second pregnancy and her being fingered as a Communist are the central crises of this film with the daily grind of turning out a weekly sitcom as a backdrop. However, Sorkin throws into many other elements. Lucy and Desi's romance and early career struggles are cursorily told in flashbacks. The costumes and production design are luxe, but because Sorkin's gifts are literary rather than visual, the flashbacks have no emotional impact. Sorkin's script makes it seem as if the only significant film Ms. Ball appeared in before her television success was The Big Street. I would advise anyone to check out Ms. Ball's contributions to Follow the Fleet, Stage Door, Five Came Back, The Dark Corner, Ziegfeld Follies, Lured, Easy Living, and The Fuller Brush Girl. 

Sorkin tries to help the viewer navigate his switching back and forth between time frames by having former writers from I Love Lucy, all played by too familiar actors, function as a Greek Chorus as they share their reminiscences of Lucy and Desi. This snarls whatever little narrative drive the film has and reinforces the notion that Sorkin would rather tell us what is happening rather than show us.

The film's feeble jabs at the redbaiting and misogyny of the era seems tacked on rather arising out of the narrative. When Lucy tells Desi to stop gaslighting her, the moment feels like a sop to 2021 rather than an expression of what 1951 was like. Part of the appeal of I Love Lucy was how slight and silly it was. The energy of Ms. Ball, like that of Jerry Lewis, was a release from the grey suited conformity of the 50s. It was comedy, like the drag of Uncle Miltie, that leaped out of the television at its audience. It was antic and contained antics. It was fun for fun's sake that reveled in its own absurdity. Could anyone imagine the self-serious Sorkin evoking this. Being the Ricardos is never fun or funny.

Part of the problem is that Nicole Kidman, one of the most talented screen actresses of our period, is not a natural comedian. She is an accomplished technician, but never the fount of energy and verve that Lucy was. Ms. Kidman gamely assays the iconic grape stomping scene and while the scene screams verisimilitude, it does not achieve the hilarity of the original high jinks. Ms. Kidman has very little onscreen chemistry with Javier Bardem. Mr. Bardem has the body of a boxer, not a song and dance man. He is better as a cop, a thug, or a psycho. My wife suggested Gael Garcia Bernal as a better fit and I concur. I would have like to seen Michelle Williams as Lucy. She certainly nailed the Jersey honk, that Lucy possessed,  when Williams played Gwen Verdon in Fosse/Verdon. Ms. Kidman's accent is intermittent.

Lucy and Desi are watered down here probably because this is an authorized bio with Luci And Desi Jr. listed as executive producers. Desi's philandering is talked about, but never shown. The real Lucy was much more profane and dogged. Richard Burton wrote that she was the toughest showbiz negotiator he had ever encountered. Only J.K. Simmons, as William Frawley, provides the period pungency that hints what could have been. As a fan of I Love Lucy and the damnably kooky The Lucy Show, I hoped for better.

Goon

Michael Dowse's Goon, from 2011, is an affably brainless hockey film. Seann William Scott plays a mentally challenged bouncer who feels undervalued by his cerebral Jewish family. After pummeling an escapee from the penalty box during a minor league game, Scott's character finds his rainbow by knocking heads, extracting teeth from his opponents and causing enough mayhem to become the titular goon.

Dowse's greatest success is in telling his simple story crisply and economically with a restrained use of closeups. He is not trying to reinvent the wheel cinematically, but endeavors to construct a comedy. Scott's family and teammates are etched well within a barely two dimensional framework. Alison Pill is charming as a hockey groupie who falls for Scott's endearingly inept wooing. The relatively gritty script gives a good sense of the alternately monotonous and frenzied nature of a hockey player's life. Liev Schreiber is particularly welcome as a veteran goon on the cusp of retirement. He, like everyone in Goon, seems in on the joke and that playfulness makes the picture a diverting comedy. 

Flash Gordon

               

Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon, from 1980, is a movie that has stuck with me through the years and now, after a recent viewing, I can begrudgingly and belatedly acknowledge its qualities. It was a staple of late night cable television in my college years and I must have watched it a half dozen times in bits and pieces. I took is as a given that it was a tacky, lowbrow Dino De Laurentiis piece of crap, but with each viewing I came away more impressed with Mike Hodges' efforts to wring some fun and even thoughtful moments out of this half-assed feature.

From my first viewing, I was taken aback how unsettling the initiation scenes on the Timothy Dalton helmed planet were. Hodges' is able to convey a real sense of dread and mystery in what is a hopelessly hokey venture. Along with this whiff of Thanatos, Hodges is able to wring a playfully perverse erotic charge out of his villains. Max von Sydow, as the Emperor Ming, and the delectable Ornella Muti as his daughter, Aura, camp it up while entertainingly yearning for the anodyne Flash and his gal, Dale. Brian Blessed, Dalton and, especially, Mariangela Melato likewise impersonate their characters with high style and gusto.

Unfortunately, the actor portraying Flash, Sam J. Jones, is among the most wooden players in the history of cinema and Melody Anderson as Dale is not much better. Both saw their careers disappear into the vapor after the commercial demise of the film. Flash Gordon's colors are striking as are the costumes and sets, though the overall effect is similar to many De Laurentiis productions in that it is both gaudy and chintzy at the same time. De Laurentiis wanted to match the success of Star Wars, but, as usual, scrimped on the budget. The football sequence, among others, attests to the improvisatory nature of a big budget feature that often looks like a B feature and lacks a coherent narrative.

Still, Hodges managed to wring out a few interesting sequences. The one where Topol is having his brain wiped and we see his memories of the Holocaust lingers in the mind. Hodges has made one masterpiece, Croupier, and a number of good features, but it is a testament to his directorial mettle that he could keep a firm hand on the tiller on such a hopeless project as Flash Gordon. 

Book Review: Forever Young by Hayley Mills

Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap

Hayley Mills' Forever Young is a rewarding memoir. My main complaint is that it lacks dish. As seamy as it gets is Ms. Mills noticing Samantha Eggar playing footsy with a married producer. Hollywood Babylon this is not. However, the rich background material on Ms. Mills' talented family is alone worth the price of admission. Even before she embarked on her acting career, she had met almost all the leading figures of English theater. Her breakthrough role in J. Lee Thompson's Tiger Bay led to a contact with Disney. By 1961, when she turned fifteen, she was one of the world's biggest box-office stars.      

Beginning with Pollyanna, who Mills sheepishly admits is her emotional double, she projected a sweet and spunky image through a number of family oriented films that still entertain today. I would recommend The Parent Trap, The Moon-Spinners, and, even, That Darn Cat!. Her image was that of a Disney cossetted virgin, but she was allowed a few forays in offbeat fare on her native turf such as Whistle Down the Wind and The Chalk Garden. Disney, however, did put the kibosh to her appearing in Kubrick's Lolita and other more grownup roles. Her career foundered after the end of her Disney contract, but it is probable that this would have happened anyway. Teen idols have a short shelf life. Hayley Mills was a cultural relic by the advent of flower power. 

Ms. Mills' rose colored glasses are rarely removed in this book. Even such noted bad boys as Rex Harrison, Frank Sinatra, Ian McShane and Placido Domingo, get off easy. Ms. Mills kept a journal during her youth and had access to the Disney archives which adds to the observant nature of this work. The memories have an overly golden glow, but how could it not since Mills was working with such luminaries as Maurice Chevalier, Pola Negri, Peter Ustinov, Alan Bates, George Sanders, Ida Lupino, Eli Wallach, Walt Disney himself, etc. Her brushes with The Beatles are hilarious and telling. 

Her fall from film stardom spurred a retreat to the English countryside to raise her sons Her marriage with 58 year old, thrice married, producer/director Ray Boulting was ill-advised and short-lived. Ms. Mills is demure, but unsparing in her portrait of Boulting. She is equally frank about her own problems with anxiety and bulimia. Her mother's lifelong alcoholism was an obvious sore point. When Ms. Mills loses her virginity on page 300 or so out of 360 or so, her mother's reaction is priceless, "So. You've finally been in the hay." It was not all rainbows and butterflies for Hayley.

Still, I should not be so snide. Forever Young is more of a clear eyed remembrance of films past than one would expect from someone with Ms. Mills' image. She is still of sunny disposition and is effusive about her spiritual interests, but darkness is visible if not dwelled upon. Forever Young is a must for Hayley fans and Disney fanatics and a maybe for film and theater geeks. 

Hayley with her parents at Grauman's Chinese Theater

  

The Lost Daughter

The Lost Daughter is a largely successful adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is responsible for the screenplay and direction, has made a striking first feature that contains first rate performances from a sterling cast: Olivia Colman, Ed Harris, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Paul Mescal, Dagmara Dominczyk and Ms. Gyllenhaal's spouse, Peter Sarsgaard. 

Gyllenhaal has changed the setting from Italy to Greece and Anglicized most of the characters, but has captured the book's mood and mysteries. Colman plays Leda, a scholar on holiday, who becomes fixated on a young mother and her daughter. Through flashbacks where Ms. Buckley plays the younger Leda, we learn that Leda's own traumatic relationship with her daughters drives her actions during the course of the film. 

Ms. Gyllenhaal does a good job of evoking claustrophobia and the peculiar sense one feels of being  buffeted by forces outside one's control while on holiday. Rain interrupts the festivities and not for a sodden kiss. The pebble beach is crowded and the resort is a little tatty. A fitting stage for an ambivalent mystery where sociopathology battles psychopathology. Gyllenhaal's direction is a little pat for a work that is soaked with ambiguity, but this is the best acted film of the year and an exemplary first feature.

Addendum (1/18/22)

I have heretofore omitted any mention of the use of Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" in The Lost Daughter. It adds another dimension to what is already a complex text in book or film form. Here is the sonnet:

                                                          Leda and the Swan

                                      A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

                                     Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

                                     By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

                                     He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

                                    How can these terrified fingers push

                                    The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

                                    And how can body, laid in that white rush,

                                    But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

                                   A shudder in the loins engenders there

                                  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

                                  And Agamemnon dead,

                                                                         Being so caught up,

                                  so mastered by the brute blood of the air,

                                  Did she put on his knowledge with his power

                                  Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

                                                                                                       1923

The erotic thrust that links "Leda and the Swan" and The Lost Daughter is too obvious to elaborate on. The Lost Daughter's Leda has two daughters like her mythic counterpart. As Yeats illustrates, Leda's daughters (Helen and Clytemnestra) helped bring on tumult and madness. Exactly what lies beneath the surface of The Lost Daughter. 

                                 

                                    

Columbus

I had been impressed by the visual essays by Kogonada that I saw before his first feature, Columbus, so I was not surprised by the assurance and acuity of this film. Every shot is framed precisely with maximal impact achieved. This is important to the film because Columbus seeks to invoke the solace gained by the contemplation of art; in this case Columbus, Indiana's modernist architecture. With one exception, Kogonada keeps his camera still in a reflective gaze upon his characters and their environs. Columbus, therefore, is not at all a dynamic film and that will limit its audience. It flirts with being airless and academic, but, ultimately, I found it to be one of the more rewarding films of recent vintage.

What prevents Columbus from being an inert exercise in film theory is Kogonada's rapport with his actors. John Cho and Parker Posey have rarely been better. Relative newcomer Haley Lu Richardson is also outstanding. They flesh out a slight tale with grounded performances that are rewardingly heartfelt. Both Cho and Richardson's characters are at an impasse in their lives and each helps the other to break out of their shells. Their relationship skirts being a romantic one, but Kogonada resists ending the film in a cliched clinch. He signals the start of their relationship with a tracking shot along a fence: their meeting providing momentum that leads to personal growth and change. The two characters challenge each other's limitation for the first time, fittingly, on a bridge that they do not cross. Form is melded with content and the actors let the moment breathe.

The most recent cinematic forebears of Columbus comprise the slow film movement that has persisted in art cinema in reaction to the adrenaline charged CGI blockbusters that clog the multiplexes: Jarmusch's Paterson, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, the films of Bela Tarr and Cristi Puiu and Richard Linklater's sunrise and sunset films. The films of Bresson and Ozu both seem to have had an influence on Kogonada's oeuvre. I have no idea if Kogonada's output will match that of his heroes, but, regardless, Columbus is a quietly outstanding debut. (9/12/17)

The Salvation

Mads Mikkelsen in The Salvation

Kristian Levring's The Salvation is a competent, if unexceptional revenge Western. Within minutes of reuniting with his bride and son, Mads Mikkelsen's Danish emigrant sees them snatched away by outlaws who massacre them. Mads exacts his pitiless revenge by the end of the second reel, but one of the miscreants has a brother, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who vows to bring Mads to justice. Eva Green is on hand as Morgan's sister-in-law. A mute, whose tongue has been cut out by Injuns, she eventually turns against Morgan and becomes Mads' ally. 

Levring coaxes good work out of his principals and paints a suitably somber setting for his revenge saga. Set design is particularly strong as the paucity of life on the frontier in the 1870s is accurately rendered. But to what end? I found the proceedings only mildly diverting with little thematic impact. Levring has made a workmanlike B Western, but its impact is fleeting. (3/12/17)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is such a slow deliberate plod through the labyrinth of John Le Carre's spy novel that I am not surprised it had little popular impact. It has a respectable critical reception and a good art house take at the till, but it got lost in the holiday shuffle for me. What excited me about the film, more so in retrospect than when I was watching it, were Alfredson's deft visual touches that convey his spies search through a maze of intrigue where all they are fated to find is their own mendacity. Alfredson frames his figures in corridors, various lifts, cells and even a chicken wire fence to show them being trapped by their own vanity and venality. 

Alfredson captures the rancid, backbiting milieu of British intelligence. The anti-hero, Smiley, is the most successful agent because he is the least egotistical and most dispassionate. He climbs the greasy pole of success through his talents not any desire for plaudits or gain. He emerges triumphant in the end and sits at the beating heart of MI6: a garish, orange padded room for top-level conferences that reeks of the early 1970s. I prefer Oldman to Alec Guinness as Smiley. Even in his most drab roles, Guinness always shows glimmers of sly humor. Smiley is a grey company man to the bone and Oldman captures this so well it helps rob the movie of dynamism. 

Unfortunately, the film telegraphs the identity of the mole by casting the most recognizable actor as said mole which thwarts ant sense of revelation and diminishes some of the suspense. Also, one of the advantages of the mini-series format is that it gives more time and space to investigate the back stories of its characters. This film has a stunning cast, a who's who of white UK actors, most notable is Tom Hardy getting a rare chance to show vulnerability. This Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an astringent film that seems daunting in its impenetrability, but will repay multiple views more than most. (9/24/17)
 

Gimme Danger

Iggy selects a victim for the evening

Jim Jarmusch's Gimme Danger is a nice valentine to those sweethearts of the 70s, Iggy and the Stooges. The Stooges reputation has grown in retrospect. At the time, they were far from a top tier group commercially, except in pockets of the Midwest, so very little live footage of them exists. Jarmusch has to make do with what he can: shaky video, talking heads, even animation. What results is a labor of love that will please fans and entrance the uninitiated.

What helps the film is that Mr. Pop is in a droll mood throughout. He may have been in bad shape as the "world's forgotten boy" in the 70s, but he is very comfortable in his leathery skin as a punk elder statesman who displays an intellectual bent that was quite hidden from view in the days of Metallic KO. Mr. Pop truly gives Gimme Danger its fizz.
 

The Best of Bogdanovich

                                                                 Peter Bogdanovich

                                                                      1939 - 2022

"I direct as an actor. Many times, I will say 'Let me try this.' And I'll walk the scene through and see what I can tell the actor about it. I don't know what to tell him until I've actually tried it and seen what the problem is."

 1) Texasville                                            1990

 2) The Last Picture Show                       1971

 3) What's Up, Doc?                                 1972

 4) They All Laughed                                1981

 5) Paper Moon                                         1973

 6) Noises Off...                                         1992

 7) Saint Jack                                            1979

 8) The Cat's Meow                                   2001

 9) Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers:

     Runnin' Down a Dream                       2007

10) The Thing Called Love                      1993

I like Targets and Mask, and even Daisy Miller and Nickelodeon. Though he never reached the cinematic pinnacles of his mentors and idols, he made many good films and few poor ones. Through youthful success and arrogance he made many enemies, but seems to have reconciled with most of them. If you are going to have an enemy, Hugh Hefner is not a bad one to have. Bogdanovich's writings are lively and recommended.

 I saw What's Up, Doc at a packed theater during its first run. I had never heard an audience so convulsed. I turned around at one point just to see three hundred roaring faces lit up by the screen. And I thought, maybe for the first time, 'How the heck did he do it?' Altogether a rich legacy. 

On the Rocks

So slight it collapses against itself, Sofia Coppola's On the Rocks evaporates in pat craftmanship. Rashida Jones plays a young mother of two who suspects her husband (Marlon Wayans) of straying with a business associate. Her Dad (Bill Murray), an eccentric millionaire, goads her into surveilling her hubby. Since Murray's character is an unrepentant philanderer, it is a case of using a thief to catch a thief. Murray takes Jones on a wild goose chase with many moments reminiscent of Coppola's Lost in Translation. Murray gets to croon a couple of standards, show off his whistling skills, and indulge in a gag with binoculars that dates from the silent film era. Murray's entrance comes twenty minutes into the film and it feels tardy because Jones and Wayans' characters have proven to be insipid. 

On the Rocks stumbles because Coppola's script wallows in cliches. The film feels like a post-feminist extension of Woody Allen's paeans to New York City. (or Coppola pere's New York Stories episode). There are beautiful shots of the Gotham skyline, talk of its fine architecture, and gobs of pre-bop jazz. Jenny Slade's clingy friend is a characterization reminiscent, in its one dimensionality, of Shelley Duvall's turn in Annie Hall. Murray is miscast as an elitist, ogling a Monet and gobbling caviar. Murray is an everyman, Irish stew variety. On the Rocks is somewhat redeemed by its visual style, but is ultimately unsatisfying.

The Honey Pot

Rex Harrison and Maggie Smith in The Honey Pot

Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Honey Pot, from 1967, is an intelligent, but clumsy comic mystery. Mankiewicz reworks Ben Jonson's Volpone and two other sources into what he intended to be a Pirandellian farce. Producer Charles K. Feldman wanted something more along the lines of his hit What's New Pussycat. Add the always volatile Rex Harrison as the Volpone character, Cyril Fox, and The Honey Pot seemed poised to be a troubled shoot.

The troubles went on for five months. Harrison and Mankiewicz feuded constantly. Cinematographers were fired and hired. Harrison's then wife, Rachel Roberts, attempted suicide during the shoot in Rome. For a good insight into the dynamics of the Harrison/Roberts union, I would recommend Richard Burton's diaries. No stranger to strong drink, even Burton was appalled at the sodden antics of the pair.

The Honey Pot is the most ramshackle looking of Feldman's productions. Cyril Fox's Venice palazzo resembles the décor of three different white telephone movies jumbled together. Mankiewicz liked bric a brac, see especially Sleuth, but the interiors here are cheap and ugly. One of the better visual jokes in the movie is, when Mr. Fox has been unmasked as a bankrupt fraud, a reveal that the bottom of a chair reads "Property of Cinecitta".

The exterior shots of Venice are all dim and badly lit. Shots seem rushed. Maybe they never had a sunny day to shoot exteriors in Venice. However, there is little excuse for the quality of the makeup and lighting in the interiors. I don't usually get hissy about visible booms or seeing its shadow, but such shoddy craftmanship is pervasive here and damaging to something that purports to be sophisticated entertainment. Capuchine has dark shadows under her eyes in The Honey Pot which aren't evident in the other productions she appeared in for Feldman. After his death in 1968, her career declined precipitously.

Capuchine, Cliff Robertson, and Edie Adams

The Honey Pot changes the sex of the old friends Fox wishes to bamboozle to female which jibes nicely with Harrison's Lothario image. Fox is assisted in his scam by the improbably named William McFly played by Cliff Robertson. Capuchine is European royalty, Edie Adams is a Hollywood star (so Mankiewicz can take a few jabs at Tinsel Town) and Susan Hayward is reduced to playing a cornpone hypochondriac. Maggie Smith is her nurse. A romance between Ms. Smith and Mr. Robertson seems truncated, probably because the film was trimmed by a half an hour between its UK and US openings. Herschel Bernardi and a number of others are listed in the film's credits, but are nowhere to be found onscreen.

Whatever was cut from the film, enough of Mankiewicz's wit and ease with the cast remain for an amusing viewing. There is certainly plenty of the bitchy hauteur one finds in All About Eve. Not much could be done about Capuchine and I won't sully the legacy of this unfortunate woman by enumerating her onscreen deficiencies. Mankiewicz does draw out the charm and feistiness of both Edie Adams and Susan Hayward. Hayward, who had worked with Mankiewicz on 1949's House of Strangers, overcomes a lousy southern accent with a kittenish performance of gleeful physicality. Despite a bad wig, Maggie Smith is luminous and ideally cast here to verbally fence with Harrison. Too few films used Smith's sexuality and vitality as this one does; maybe just Young Cassidy and Travels with My Aunt. It is a pity she got stuck playing umpteen repressed spinsters on film from Miss Jean Brodie to Professor McGonagall.

A number of critics, particularly Roger Ebert, found Cliff Robertson to be stiff in his role, but I thought Mankiewicz drew out a more playful Robertson than his stolid turns in PT 109 or Battle of the Coral Sea. Robertson was an All-American type who worked best when tweaking that image with rascality or psychosis, as in Underworld USA, The Best Man, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Three Days of the Condor, Obsession, Star 80 and Escape from L.A.. His roles in the David Begelman scandal and Sam Raimi's Spider Man confirmed his good guy image, but where do they finish in Hollywood?

I am not a huge admirer of Rex Harrison. The attempted seduction scenes in The Honey Pot made even this iron stomached libertarian queasy knowing what I do of Harrison's personal life. Still, he gets to do Henry Higgins again and that is his range. Harrison did good work for Mankiewicz in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and, even, Cleopatra while Burton and Taylor were otherwise engaged. This is one of the better Harrison starring vehicles of the era in comparison to such duds as Cleopatra, The Yellow Rolls Royce, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Staircase and, especially, Doctor Doolittle. Noel Coward said that if Harrison hadn't been the second best British light comic actor, Coward gave himself the top spot, he would have been a good car salesman. 

The Bad Batch

Jim Carrey in The Bad Batch

Ana Lily Amirpour's The Bad Batch sunk without a trace and I am perhaps being charitable when I describe it as an interesting failure. A post-apocalyptic, dystopian feature with dollops of cannibalism, The Bad Batch has one of the lamest scripts I've encountered in some time and runs out of narrative drive halfway through. Its leading lady, Suki Waterhouse, struggles with her Texas accent and is a cinematic black hole throughout. Dialogue scenes with Ms. Waterhouse and any other cast member flag badly. Jason Momoa fares slightly better, but the cast is hit or miss. Jim Carrey is affecting as a hermit, but Giovanni Ribisi grates as "The Screamer". Keanu Reeves is effectively louche as a cult leader, but is underused.

What makes me think Ms. Amirpour has a future in film is that The Bad Batch looks pretty good. Her use of color here is as effective as her use of black and white in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. A bonding scene with Ms. Waterhouse teaching a child to use makeup is suitably swathed in warm reds. The Bad Batch is a misstep, but Ms. Amirpour has too good of an eye to be counted out. (9/27/17)

What's the Matter with Helen?

Curtis Harrington's What's the Matter with Helen?, from 1971, has a nifty first act that establishes a creepy 1930's vibe, but it runs out of momentum halfway and never climaxes, it just sort of peters out. Writer Henry Farrell had helped pen Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (he wrote its source novel) and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, so it is no surprise that he had run out of interesting variations on the menopausal madness trope. Harrington and associates spruce up the studio sets with masks, dolls, statuary, mirrors, deco lighting, feathers and fluff, but can't get much out of his action or suspense scenes. 

Debbie Reynolds is well cast as a dance instructor who tutors aspiring Shirley Temples and pacifies there gargoyle like mothers. Reynolds gets to show off her dance moves and trademark pert moxie. Harrington is most at home in light surrealism. The pageant numbers with moppets singing the likes of "Animal Crackers in My Soup" and an Aimee Semple McPherson revival meeting reenacted with a crackling performance by Agnes Morehead are the sections of the film that most fit his vision. 

Shelley Winters is miscast as a meek and crazed bible thumper. Ms. Winters could do crazed, but not meek. The two volumes of her memoirs were big beach reading in their time and deservedly so. She nicely underplays and her performance gains power, but she seems incongruous throughout. She is bound to Reynolds because they birthed a pair of Leopold and Loeb types, but that back story is perfunctory. Also, what mystery there is is unresolved as Ms. Winters runs amok at the conclusion and murders bunnies. The film is a half hour too long and Dennis Weaver is a void as Ms. Reynolds' love interest. Micheal Mac Liammoir, Timothy Carey, and Molly Dodd (Mrs. Henry Farrell) have nice character bits, but though I thoroughly enjoyed What's the Matter with Helen?, I can't quite recommend it. 

The Assignment

Walter Hill's The Assignment was one of the most critically pilloried films of the past year, but I found it to be somewhat diverting. What interested me was Hill's decision to structure the film as if it were a graphic novel. He telegraphs this by freezing ends of scenes and morphing his frame into animated versions of the story. This strategy gives the film the scrappy energy it needs to somewhat transcend its rote genre premise. Hill is a solid action director, but this film illustrates why, despite some commercial success, he has never risen to the front rank of American directors.

What got the goat of most critics is that The Assignment tackles transgender issues in a blunt, comic book style. Michelle Rodriquez portrays a hit man who runs afoul of Sigourney Weaver's Lecter-like doctor when Rodriquez performs a contract killing on Weaver's brother. Weaver gets her revenge on Rodriquez by kidnapping him and changing him into a her. Rodriquez' hitman is a soulless, macho thug who is horrified that he has been turned into a woman and spends the rest of the picture seeking revenge. I think that the misogyny and transphobia Hill has been accused of is that of Rodriquez's character, Frank Kitchen (ahem), and that, thus, such criticism is off the mark. Rodriquez is adept at showing off her butch side and imbues her character's horror with a keening vulnerability that gives the picture some gravitas.

However, Hill throws in references to Shakespeare and Poe that, instead of deepening the picture's themes, come off as vestigial errata. He is not helped by Weaver's monochromatic performance which turns her character into a literally castrating bitch. The cast is otherwise strong and Hill's camera setups are always on target. Phil Norden's editing is exemplary.

When compared to Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In, a film with a similar theme, The Assignment's shortcomings become fairly obvious. Furthermore, The Assignment is a virtual remake of Hill's best film, Johnny Handsome, also a revenge flick in which a post surgical Mickey Rourke hunts down his nemeses. The use of masks in both films point to Hill's chief theme of men struggling with their identities. The dour Hill usually portrays his (always male) protagonists succumbing to their darker and more violent urges. The Assignment is not as worthless as most critics have painted it to be, but Johnny Handsome is a more successful variation of Hill's thematic concerns. (10/11/17)