The Iceman

Michael Shannon and Ray Liotta in The Iceman

Ariel Vromen's The Iceman is a little seen B, from 2013, with an above average cast that portrays the career of a contract killer with pointless sobriety. Vromen shows some skill with actors, but his lackluster kitchen sink mise en scene fails to transcend a cliched script. The Iceman melts away from the mind as a sub-Scorsese genre film.

Michael Shannon is perfect as the titular character, he simply needs to project his stone face into oblivion. Winona Ryder is miscast, but struggles gamely as the Jersey gal who can't help but love the big lug with a heart of nickel plating. Shannon's character is typed as a repressed victim of parental abuse whose PTSD triggers violent rages. I could only sigh at the knee jerk gimmick. One superb scene of Shannon being confronted by his incarcerated brother registers, but little else. Ray Liotta is a mob capo, ho hum, and James Franco pops up as an amateur pornographer who Shannon dispatches. Standard genre stuff that won't thrust Shannon into lead roles unless someone remakes The Golem. (6/16/16)

   

Quick Takes, October 2022

Lux AEterna

Gaspar Noe's Lux AEterna is a fifty minute film about filmmaking that was dashed off in five days. All the actors involved play versions of themselves. Beatrice Dalle is the director of a medieval epic concerning witchcraft. She has fun playing a bitch on wheels. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the beset upon star of the chaotic production. The film's climax is a technical malfunction on the set which bathes the players in strobe effects. Epileptics be warned. I enjoyed the improvised playfulness of the film and its visual invention, but doubt I would ever revisit it. Lux AEterna seems to be more of a throat clearing exercise for Noe than a major work. He would revisit the split screen technique employed here to greater effect in the subsequent Vortex. 

Lynn Shelton's Touchy Feely is a slight, but winning feature from 2013. The film combines a look at family dynamics with some gentle New Age satire. Nothing earthshaking, but Shelton always managed to inspire winning turns from her cast; in this case Rosemarie DeWitt, Ron Livingston, Elliot Page, and Allison Janney. Josh Pais is especially effective as an inhibited dentist.

Rob Zombie's The Munsters, currently streaming on Netflix, seeks to emulate the goofy humor of the television series rather than the hardcore horror found in Zombie's cinematic oeuvre. The results are predictably hit and miss. I enjoyed Juci Szurdi's DayGlo production design and the overall amiability of the movie, but it is at least thirty minutes too long and Zombie's script is haphazard and badly structured. Jeff Daniel Phillips is dizzily amusing as Herman Munster, but Shari Moon Zombie, as Lily Munster, is a director's wife. Mr. Zombie's personality seems more attuned to the frenetic splatter of The Devil's Rejects and 31 than such child friendly fare as The Munsters. 

Istvan Szabo's Sunshine, from 2000, is a three hour historical epic chronicling a Jewish family in Hungary. Ralph Fiennes does triple duty as successive patriarchs of the clan in a film that spans the 20th century. Szabo, as in Mephisto and Colonel Redl, focuses on the corruption and intolerance that has bedeviled Hungary since the beginning of the reign of Franz Joseph. The screenplay, by Szabo and Israel Horovitz, threatens to descend into a soap opera occasionally, but an impressive cast that includes Jennifer Ehle, Rosemary Harris, Rachel Weisz, John Neville, and William Hurt elevates the material. Two hunting parties fifty years apart demonstrates the common thread underlying Hungarian history no matter who the ruling party was, namely brutality. Recommended. 

John Andreas Andersen's The Burning Sea is Norwegian disaster film in which an oil rig explosion leads to an even greater environmental disaster. This film, like The Wave and Andersen's The Quake, reflects Norway's current environmental anxiety. The merchants of fossil fuel are, naturally, the villains. The film is not incompetent, merely silly and dull. I did like Kristine Kujath Thorp as the protagonist. Better than Earthquake, but not as good as The Poseidon Adventure. 

A flight of fancy that never takes flight, Tom Gormican's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent features Nicholas Cage playing himself. Unfortunately, this prime comic opportunity for a meta comment on movie stardom devolves into a routine thriller featuring the CIA and arms dealers. A footnote rather than a capstone to a great career.

Catherine Called Birdy

Bella Ramsey as Catherine Called Birdy

Lena Dunham's Catherine Called Birdy is an enjoyable medieval lark. Adapted by Dunham from a highly praised YA novel by Karen Cushman, the film tells of a late 13th century English lass who is being bartered as a bride by her impoverished father. Birdy has just reached womanhood at fourteen and is not keen on being wed to a suitor just yet. She shows her pluck by proving her unsuitability to an array of hapless prospective bridegrooms. Just when it looks like she will be wed to the worst of the lot, her father comes through in the end.

Dunham never condescends to her material, even when it is predictable and sophomoric. This is a film aimed at the teen in all of us, much like such period films as Ella Enchanted and A Knight's Tale; albeit with more jokes about menstruation and flatulence. Like those films, Catherine Called Birdy reflects modern sensibilities despite its medieval guise. Rock classics fill the soundtrack (along with Carter Burwell's spritely score) and the set design resembles a Renaissance Faire rather than medieval reality. Dunham celebrates girl power and satirizes the patriarchy, yet always maintains a convivial, audience pleasing tone. 

She is greatly helped by a talented cast who all seem to be in on the joke: including Andrew Scott, Billie Piper, Leslie Sharp, Joe Alwyn, Paul Kaye and Isis Hainsworth. Bella Ramsey as Birdy fully embodies the rambunctious tomboy. The film is far from serious fare, but Dunham treats its themes seriously and regards her heroine with fond respect. Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.  

Pulp

Robert Sacchi and Lizabeth Scott in Pulp

Mike Hodges' Pulp, released in New York in early 1973, is a detective spoof that is neither fish nor fowl. It is funny in its peculiarity, but does not induce much laughter. Because it does not take its plot seriously, the mystery elements of the film have little impact. The film was a star vehicle for Michael Caine and reunites him with the director of the more brutal and successful Get Carter. Caine plays Mickey King, a bounder who has deserted his wife and kids back in England and fled to the south of Italy where he makes a living churning out pulp fiction. He becomes embroiled in a murderous plot after agreeing to ghost write the memoirs of a George Raft type Hollywood star, memorably played by Mickey Rooney.

Rooney and Caine are both superb here and are the main reason to see the film. Caine's narration ties together this shambolic film. However, the quality of the other performances varies greatly. Dennis Price (Kind Hearts and Coronets) and Al Lettieri ( The Godfather and The Getaway and very memorable in fourteen other film credits before dying too soon at 47 in 1975) are effective and well utilized. Nadia Cassini, an actress unknown to me, is a washout as the female lead. She has zero chemistry with Caine, but gets to show off her gorgeous gams in some of the funky fashions of the day: mini-skirts and hot pants. Lizabeth Scott, who appeared in a number of memorable noirs in the late 40s and early 50s, seems very ill at ease here. Her performance is alternately stiff and shaky, but Hodges, at least, makes her an effectively spectral presence. This was to be her last film appearance. Robert Sacchi, who specialized as a Humphrey Bogart imitator, is on hand as a henchman. The stunt nature of the casting is indicative of the half-assed spoof elements of the film, most of which fall flat. 

One element of the film I did find interesting was its political engagement. Rooney's character, Preston Gilbert, has fallen in with a bunch of local oligarchs who are backing the candidacy of a neo-fascist. These black shirts are juxtaposed with the salt of the earth locals King meets who are largely communists. It is implied that Gilbert had communist leanings and was obliged to leave his Hollywood career behind because of the blacklist. Lionel Stander, a veteran actor and actual victim of the blacklist, is on hand as Gilbert's aide-de-camp. He has a number of pungent turns, especially one while lounging in a pool drinking a dark and stormy. The milieu of the film is too cartoonish to take its political themes entirely seriously, but the recent ascendancy of Ms. Meloni to the premiership of Italy gives it some extra resonance in 2022.

Pulp was shot on the isle of Malta. Its camp version of noir and Mediterranean setting reminded me of another curious and not entirely successful film, John Huston's Beat the Devil. I am a big fan of pulp detective stories, my favorites are Chandler, Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, so I did appreciate the loving tributes to the genre contained in Pulp. However, non-fans may be less indulgent because the film is a structurally a mess. Cinephiles will find much to pick apart, but this film's dizzy charm will be lost to most. It would go well on a double bill with Robert Altman's acerbic The Long Goodbye or Roman Polanski's even more bizarre What? . 

Death Watch

Harvey Keitel and Romy Schneider in the batty Death Watch

Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch, from 1980, is a different kettle of fish. The scenario has Harvey Keitel as a character implanted with television cameras in his eyes. Harry Dean Stanton plays a sleazy producer, a role that squanders his talents. Stanton's character enlists Keitel in a reality TV series where they exploit the plight of Romy Schneider, a woman who thinks she is dying. The script is bonkers, but there is a conviction in the direction and, particularly, Keitel's performance that somewhat redeems this opus shot in Glasgow.

Tavernier's tracking shots of a pursuit through a seedy carnival are particularly interesting, evoking a sense of menace and entrapment. However, Schneider is out of her comfort zone (Sissi, La Piscine, What's New Pussycat) playing a woman on the edge and the narrative fails to cohere around her plight. Max von Sydow shows up in the last fifteen minutes as Schneider's ex-husband and the film's deus ex machina. The ending is awkward and clunky. It is obvious that they had von Sydow for a day or two on one set and they had to tie everything up and slap 'the end' on it. 

I have always been a Keitel fan, in fact I prefer the overall arc of his career to DeNiro's, but was astounded by the conviction and intensity of his performance. Scenes that could have been laughable, like Keitel screaming in terror at being kept in a dark cell or pounding his head in frustration against some seashore rocks, have an undeniable power and fierceness. As in Bad Lieutenant and The Piano, Keitel's willingness to go all the way skirts absurdity, but ultimately pays off in terms of emotional impact. The late Robbie Coltrane makes the most of his first film appearance as a thuggish limo driver. 

Hit the Road

Mohammad Hassan Madjooni and Amin Simiar in Hit the Road

The best directorial debut in many a moon and the first undeniably great new film I've seen in 2022, Panah Panahi's Hit the Road is a road film suffused with heart, soul, and humor. The film pictures a family of four on a road trip through rural Iran. The reasons for the excursion are covert, the three older members of the clan are intent on keeping a few secrets from the little brother. The tyke, played winningly by Rayan Sarlak, is full of beans and is the source of most of the humor of the film. Mohammad Hassan Madjooni plays the father and Amin Simiar the older brother. These are less showy roles, but both players are superb. Best of all is Pantea Panahiha as the mother. Panahi twice fixes his camera on Panahiha in close-up at important junctures and the actress is able to convey a shifting array of emotions in a few fleeting moments. It is a titanic performance.

The first third of the film focuses on the interactions of the family members, doing a wonderful job of establishing the characters and the relationship dynamics between them. Panahi establishes the loving nature of the family, but also the irritations that result from close confinement and intimacy. At two crucial points in the film, at the start of a separation and at the moment when a reunion is postponed, Panahi chooses to film the sequences in long shot. This may seem a contrary choice by the director, intimate and emotional moments seem to demand that the camera be closer to the action, but the characters' have been so well developed by this point, we know what the emotions on their faces will read. These moments contain an attribute rarely found in modern cinema, discretion. The long shots also reinforce the notion that there are larger historical forces that are shaping the destiny of the characters.

The stunning landscape of Iran, indeed, is a major element in the film, as is music. Tunes range from Schubert to Iranian pop songs. The songs help the character tap into their underlying emotions and provide them catharsis. At film's end, the remaining inhabitants of the vehicle ride on with a song in their hearts and tears in their eyes, all traveling down the road to meet their own mortality.

A lot of films I see are targeted for specific audiences. Art films, action films, horror films, etc. Hit the Road is a film of universal appeal and scope. I cannot recommend it highly enough as a film that I think will enchant everyone. It contains multitudes. I haven't even touched on its cinephilia and its touching portrait of the family's bond with their dog. A film I will treasure and revisit.

In Fabric

Marianne Jean-Baptiste dons a cursed dress in In Fabric

Peter Strickland's In Fabric, from 2018, is an art film that satirizes consumerism. A cursed red dress passes from one wearer to another bringing doom to all. The center of the action is a Marks & Spencer type department store presided over by a coven of Adorno quoting witches. Realism is the furthest thing from Strickland's mind. The supernatural doings recall the Giallo strain of horror.

I found the film to be a step forward from Strickland's previous film, The Duke of Burgundy, mostly because he gives a little more warmth and humanity to his principal players. I admired the performances of Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Leo Bill, and Hayley Squires. I certainly won't forget Ms. Jean-Baptiste suffering through one of the worst first dates in cinematic history. Ms. Jean-Baptiste's character finds her date through the personal ads, another way in which Strickland seek to critique consumerism. In this version of the capitalist marketplace, we are all reduced to discrete commodities. 

In truth, I feel Strickland flogs this theme a little too vigorously. Transitional sequences, accompanied by the discordant bleeps and bloops of Cavern of Anti-Matter's soundtrack, show montages of fashion ads, personal ads, and consumer friendly spaces. These redundant sequences pad a film which could easily lose twenty minutes or so. Still, most of the film's technical aspects, save the score, are outstanding; especially Ari Wegner's cinematography. Strickland resembles Peter Greenaway in his visual gifts and his chilly, cerebral tone. Happily, In Fabric introduces the saving grace of empathy.

Elite Squad

Wagner Moura in Elite Squad

Jose Padilha's Elite Squad, from 2007, is crime drama set in the slums of Rio de Janeiro in 1997. Wagner Moura plays Captain Nascimento, the leader of an elite SWAT unit called upon to battle the militias of drug lords when the local police are overmatched. His narration holds together the often scrambled narrative. His wife is urging him to leave the force and escape the stress that is weighing upon him. He promises her he will, but not until he finds a replacement for himself. The first half of the film features the back story of two rookie cops, Matias and Neto, whose lives intersect with Nascimento. The Captain sees potential in the two rookies and recruits them to his unit. The second half of the film begins with a boot camp segment that makes the one in Full Metal Jacket look like a Sunday School picnic. After surviving this ordeal, Matias and Neto join the unit for Operation Holiness, an effort to clean up the slums before the visit of Pope John Paul II.

Things go rather badly. Padilha portrays the police as institutionally corrupt, no different, in essence, than the drug lords . Neto, who is also studying to be a lawyer, is assigned a report on Foucault which rather baldly highlights the theme of "perverse institutions". Padilha even opens the film with a quote from Stanley Milgram stressing the limits of free will in a deterministic world.

The film was a huge hit in Brazil and spawned a sequel. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin and has achieved cult status. Moura is superb and the actors who portray Matias and Neto are also effective. The intricately constructed script is the main attribute of the film. However, Padilha's directorial technique brings mixed results at best. He goes for a hand held cinema verite style that does give the film some immediacy, but, also, a lack of coherence. The camera ping pongs back and forth between talking heads with whip pans that almost made me seasick. Without Nascimento's narration, the film verges on incomprehensibility.

The success of Elite Squad proved a boon to both Padilha and Moura. The pair reunited for Narcos in which Moura played Pablo Escobar. Elite Squad is a scathing look at the drug war, but it suffers from Padilha's inexperience as a director. 

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Daisy Ridley and John Boyega escape mild peril

J. J. Abrams' Star Wars: The Force Awakens zips along merrily for most of its two hours, but remains so tightly entombed in the Lucas sarcophagi that it packs little emotional wallop. There is too much regurgitation of the themes and tropes of the initial film to surprise, much less enlighten the viewer. My daughter, breaking out of the thrall of geekdom, complained of the revisiting of the destruction of the Death Star in this film's climax.

The numerous scriptwriters also reprise the dime book Jungian theme of a character succumbing to his shadow self: this time Princess Leia and Han Solo spawn Adam Driver, whose performance gives the film its only spasm of psycho-mythic intensity, embraces the dark side of the force instead of comely Daisy Ridley for reasons comprehensible only to true believers. Ridley and fellow newcomer John Boyega fail to register, but then so do Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Max von Sydow. Methinks the culprit is a leaden script.

When Lucas helmed the last trilogy, he ran aground in his expository scenes: henchman haranguing each other or Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen mooning on a balcony with ridiculous dialogue out of some forgotten Biblical epic with Natalie Wood and Tab or Jeffrey Hunter. Lucas replays scenes from his favorite pulp films as much as Tarantino, but in a passive, not antic fashion. Abrams gives his crack at the franchise a little more youthful zest, particularly in a superbly directed action sequence that surveys and punctuates the PG-13 carnage with a circle dolly.

Unfortunately, Carrie Fisher seems embalmed, not nearly as lively as in Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars. Harrison Ford is embarrassing in the action bits. I remember when John Wayne was past his prime and I felt sorry for the horses he mounted as they buckled under his weight, but he always redeemed even his most ridiculous roles of the 70s with humility and self-mockery. Ford's persona is largely humorless and cocky, much tougher to pull off as you get older. Ford hasn't appeared in a decent movie since Air Force One in 1997. I was glad to see Han Solo bumped off here so I don't have to worry about Ford's on-set safety, but there is always the next Indiana Jones role with which to flog dead horses. (5/15/16)

Blonde

Ana de Armas in Blonde

Though it has its defenders, Andrew Domink's Blonde has met with a largely hostile reaction from critics and viewers. Indeed, quite a few of its critics resemble town criers intoning "unclean, unclean" when reviewing this Netflix feature. I am somewhat on the fence, the film's elements range greatly in effectiveness, but I give it a qualified recommendation for the hardy few. Those few being mostly horror aficionados who might be able grok Dominik's purpose better than most. For this adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novel from 2000, is largely a horror film. 

I bring up the source novel because  the criticism of this film has contained many objections that this is not a real or rounded portrait of Marylin. I would suggest that the concept of the "real" Marilyn is a slippery one. There are a multiplicity of Marilyns at this point. Ms. Joyce chose to make a poetic nightmare out of Ms. Monroe's life and Mr. Dominik's remains largely faithful to that vision. The least successful episodes in the book seem similarly silly in the film: specifically the menage a trois with the sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson and Marilyn's dialogues with her aborted fetus. I also can't defend the POV shot from Marilyn's vagina of her gynecologist handling his speculum or the POV shot from JFK's pubis as Monroe fellates him; despite these adding to the element of body horror in the film. This is a portrait of a Marilyn whose corpus is not her own, but one claimed by the howling male yahoos of the American body politic. 

Bad taste is timeless. What seemed tawdry in Ms. Oates book twenty years ago when I read it, remains so today in this film. I thought that it was not one of Ms. Oates' better books at the time, but that it was better than Mailer's joke of a book on the subject. One element Dominik tweaked and improved upon was making Marilyn's demise more ambiguous. In the book, an assassin sent by JFK offs her. In the film, the surveillance of Marilyn by unseen forces is made plain and spooky agents and specters stalk her house as she slips her mortal coil, but there is no direct cause and effect. Both book and film hammer home too bluntly the theme of Marilyn's loss of identity. Ana de Armas even has to baldly voice the notion that she realizes Marilyn is a construct and that Norma Jean is to be forever traumatized by the memory of her mad mother and absent father.

Such dubious dialogue puts too much weight on Ms. Armas' bony shoulders. She is a promising actress, but is overmatched here. She captures superficial aspects of Marilyn, the breathy voice for instance, but lacks her volcanic power. A beautiful woman, Armas doesn't have the overwhelming voluptuousness of Monroe and her, onscreen, aura of fun and sport. There are some good performances in the film, most especially Julianne Nicholson and Adrian Brody. Brody is an ideal match for that fellow Gotham native, Arthur Miller. 

What else did I like about the film? Mostly the choices Dominik made regarding the film's technical and formal aspects. Dominik and his associates spent a lot of researching the look of Marilyn's various films, film sets, press shoots press conferences, nudie photos, and advertisements. Whether black or white or color, the recreations in the film are an amazing match to the tones and shades of the originals. I thought they reinforced the film's theme of "Marilyn" being a media construct totally divorced from Norma Jean. I feel Blonde succeeds visually even when its sordid and haphazard narrative fails. 

Dominik is among the most misanthropic of today's directors. I am not sure he was the best choice to direct this project. The result reminds me of an Otto Preminger musical. He seems more attuned to the dog eat machinations of males in his two Brad Pitt films and Chopper. I am not sure if Dominik can make an entirely successful film with a female protagonist. He seems more interested in the big bad wolves of life than in the red riding hoods. Blonde is his least successful film, but, given the unpromising material on which it was based, it turned out to be better than I expected. 

La Chienne

Michel Simon in La Chienne

Jean Renoir's La Chienne, from 1931, may be his first masterwork. A romantic triangle involving a pimp, a whore and a meek clerk, La Chienne displays Renoir's nimble conducting of actors and heralds the Popular Front humanism of his films in the 30s. 

The acting of the three leads (Michel Simon, Janie Marese and Georges Flamant) is nonpareil. Compare them to the leads in Fritz Lang's very good 1945 remake, Scarlet Street, and one sees Renoir's mastery in his handling of actors. Though somewhat miscast as a nebbish, Edward G. Robinson fares the best of Lang's three leads, but he lacks the naturalism of Simon. Dan Duryea was well cast as the pimp and I always find him entertaining. However, his performance sometimes descends to schtick (albeit enjoyable schtick) whereas Flamant seems at ease in the cafes and bars he inhabits and is not the least bit stagy. Duryea seems merely petulant at times and lacks Flamant's menace. Joan Bennett, a limited performer, is too old for her part and lacks the baby doll languor that Marese brings to the role. Bennett seems to be hitting the "I'm a hard edged bitch" button a bit too much, but since Lang is not a naturalistic directors of actors like Renoir is, that may just what Fritz wanted to cut through the smothering Production Code guidelines.

It is hard to watch Marese's performance and not think what a loss her early death was. She was far from a Montmartre chippie, but is deadly accurate portraying one. She was seeing Flamant, after rejecting Simon's advances, and was killed in an accident while riding in an auto driven by Flamant. Simon would go on to work in Renoir's next film in which he would play the immortal Boudu. 

Georges Flamant and Janie Marese 

The contrast with Scarlet Street casts an interesting light on the differences between Lang and Renoir. Scarlet Street is more of an expressionistic horror story which ends with Robinson walking the streets a madman. Simon is a bum at the end of La Chienne, but almost a joyous one; like Chaplin as the little Tramp or Stepin Fetchit in John Ford's films. His rejection of bourgeoise propriety has liberated him. Renoir portrays the plutocrats that bully Simon at the beginning almost like George Grosz caricatures. A dolly down a banquet table types them as fat, greedy capitalists straight out of Eisenstein. The Popular Front hadn't formed then, but Renoir's work here in La Chienne and Boudu display that its spirit was in the air.

The film also belies the notion that the early talkies were fraught with technical limitations. Renoir employs quite a few tracking shots, particularly one early in the film when Simon escorts his damsel in distress. The shot contrasts the courtliness and newfound intimacy between the two as they stroll through a sordid neighborhood; much like Ford's tracking shot of Dallas and the Ringo Kid as they walk pass the saloons and brothels of Lordsburg. However, Renoir's whore, unlike Ford's, does not have a heart of gold.

Included in Criterion's La Chienne  disc is the film Renoir undertook before La Chienne, Purge Bebe. This short farce is easily the worst Renoir film I have seen, but what can one expect of a film shot hurriedly entitled Baby's Laxative. It has a kind of goofy charm (I enjoyed Michel Simon breaking chamber pots), but was obviously made for a quick franc. In that the film's success enabled Renoir to make La Chienne, it served its purpose. 

The Best of Angela Lansbury

                 

                                                                  Angela Lansbury

                                                                     1925 - 2022

       I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and people's mothers. I have only a few 

       more years left to kick up my heels. 

1.   The Manchurian Candidate                             1962         John Frankenheimer
2.   The World of Henry Orient                              1964         George Roy Hill
3.   Samson and Delilah                                         1949         Cecil B. DeMille
4.   Gaslight                                                             1944         George Cukor
5.   National Velvet                                                  1944         Clarence Brown
6.   The Long Hot Summer                                     1958         Martin Ritt
7.   The Picture of Dorian Gray                              1945         Albert Lewin
8.   The Company of Wolves                                 1984         Neil Jordan
9.   Beauty and the Beast                                      1991   Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
10.   Harlow                                                              1965           Gordon Douglas

Best known to my generation as a sleuth on the long-running television show Murder She Wrote, she had a long and fruitful career. On film, I treasure her turns in The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, State of the Union, The Three Musketeers, The Court Jester, Blue Hawaii, Something for Everyone, The Mirror Crack'd, and All Fall Down. She never mailed in a performance in even the most woeful project. 

We are fortunate to have the cast recordings of her work in Anyone Can Whistle, Mame, Dear World, and, most of all, Sweeney Todd. I was lucky enough to see her as Mrs. Lovett, surely the greatest performance I have seen in a musical. I saw the show in Boston with a group of friends including the late Jack Ward. Jack was the foremost admirer of Ms. Lansbury I have ever encountered. She vied with Lillian Gish for the top of his personal pantheon. Jack, this list is for you and I hope you are having a glass of port with Angela in paradise tonight. 

The Suspect

Ella Raines and Charles Laughton in The Suspect

Robert Siodmak's The Suspect, from 1945. is an engrossing murder mystery set in Edwardian London, aka the Universal Studios' backlot. Charles Laughton stars as a mild mannered tobacconist who becomes embroiled in multiple murders after falling for a young typist played by the engaging Ella Raines. A stellar supporting cast of expatriate British talent ably assists: Stanley Ridges, Henry Daniell (as a "rotter"), Molly Lamont, and Rosalind Ivan. Ms. Ivan reprised her performance as a shrewish wife later that year opposite Edward G. Robinson in Scarlet Street.

Siodmak was expert at marshalling, fog, light, and shadow to give character to recycled Universal sets. The Suspect has little sense of the out of doors, yet the interiority of the film suits what is essentially a character study. Siodmak gives depth to the proceedings. Notice how the pans in establishing shots of two different restaurant settings give an illusion of space and a heightening of mood. His best choice on the set was to frighten and then soothe the insecure Laughton and make him the pivot of the film. The camera in The Suspect often seems poised on the twinkle in Laughton's eye. 

Ella Raines manages to seem nice without being saccharine. but is dominated by Laughton in their scenes. However, so is everyone else, including a cat. Laughton takes on his scenes as if he were sparring with his fellow cast members, with no doubt as to who the champ is. What is remarkable about the performance is its warmth. Laughton was mostly cast as mannered villains (Mutiny on the Bounty, Jamaica Inn), oligarchs of owlish arrogance (Spartacus, Advise and Consent) or outsized buffoons (The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Tuttles of Tahiti). He could do so much more. Check out the recording of a production of Shaw's Don Juan in Hell on YouTube. Laughton directed and starred as Lucifer, along with Charles Boyer, Agnes Moorehead, and Cedric Hardwicke. It is splendid. My father said the theatrical highlight of his life was seeing a production of Stephen Benet's  John Brown's Body that Laughton directed. He said he had gone in thinking that Tyrone Power was a Hollywood lightweight and was amazed at the performance Laughton coaxed from him. And then there is the wonder that is The Night of the Hunter, perhaps the greatest one off in cinema. If anything, Laughton was pigeon holed and underserved by Hollywood. That is why his sensitive performance in The Suspect is the one I most treasure alongside his butler in Ruggles of Red Gap. 

Straight Outta Compton

                       
F. Gary Gray's Straight Outta Compton is a relatively straightforward musical biopic that benefits from Gray's strength at portraying male bonding. The film has been criticized for glossing over NWA's more unsavory aspects, particularly Dr. Dre's abuse of women, but this strikes me as typical of the rose colored glasses that Hollywood dons when assaying a musical biopic whether it be Night and Day, Funny Girl or Lady Sings the Blues. Paul Giamatti's Jewish manager could have been a stock figure out of any of these pictures or, indeed, any urban based Hollywood musical of the 20th century. Straight Outta Compton seeks to mythologize NWA as righteous rebels who are galvanized into musical action by a racist system. Gray seeks to spread that myth by printing the legend and his film works within that framework.

Gray has previously worked almost entirely within the action genre, but is able to reinvestigate the honor among thieves theme he explored most rewardingly in The Italian Job. His portrayal of the ups and downs of the esprit between Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E brings the film to life; DJ Yella and MC Ren, predictably, are given short shrift compared to their comrades. When Gray uses a crane shot to heighten the import of NWA entering the arena of their first big gig, he presents their career as an epic quest to find meaning and catharsis in a hostile world. Nearly all of NWA's flaws are banished from this self-produced film, even their dire second album is ignored. Suge Knight is tapped to embody the dark side of the rap world and, admittedly, he is a good candidate for villainy. Eazy-E's demise provides the tragic denouement that this allegedly gritty, yet traditionally cheesy Hollywood biopic demands. (5/9/16)

Quick Takes, November 2016

Justin Timberlake and friends

Jonathan Demme's Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids is, not surprisingly given the director, a superior concert film. Demme gives us the spectacle of Timberlake and his cohorts closing out their tour at the MGM Grand, but he also captures their interplay and camaraderie.

Edward Dmytryk and Irving Reis' Hitler's Children is a bizarre B propaganda film that RKO released during the early days of  America's active participation in World War 2. Tim Holt is convincing as a Hitler Youth recruit who falls for anti-Nazi, Bonita Granville. Otto Kruger, Hans Conreid, and HB Warner lend able support and the scrip has a few good moments. However, RKO really skimped on the sets and whoever directed the fight scenes fumbled badly. Ms. Granville's appeal escapes me.

Jake Szymanski's Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is as brain dead as its title implies, but, thanks to its talented cast, provides some chortles. Anna Kendrick, Adam Devine, Aubrey Plaza and the increasingly animated Zac Efron are game for the hijinks in this Wedding Crashers rip-off. If your expectations are low, you will be rewarded with mild hilarity. Szymanski's direction shows very little visual dexterity, favoring medium shots that do allow his players to milk whatever laughs they can get out of yet another script highlighting the arrested development of our twenty somethings. 

Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You is an undistinguished teen comedy based on The Taming of the Shrew. Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles sparkle as the leads, but the direction and script wouldn't pass muster for a Disney Channel movie. 

Charlie Chaplin's A Dog's Life is thirty three minutes of joy and delight. It is 1918 and Chaplin's powers as a filmmaker are in full fruition. He can conjure Dickensian slums with a simple set and a mutt. A homeless tramp, substance abusers galore, cops, it sounds like winter in Portland, 2016. The shadow of Chaplin's vaudeville days hangs over the music hall sequences in this film as it would over his entire career. A masterpiece. 

Cabin Fever, X

Cabin Fever

Two horror films I caught recently led me to muse on the strains of American Gothic that have persisted in our cultural landscape. The two prime inventors of the American Gothic template are two decadent Romantics, Poe and Hawthorne. Poe's influence on the horror film is too obvious to be belabored, but I want to stress that Poe's literary and cultural models were European. Many of Poe's famous stories are set in a real or imagined Europe (The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum) Hawthorne's Gothic legacy is almost wholly focused on his disgust with his Puritan forebears. Since the 19th century, writers from a variety of regions in the US have utilized the Gothic genre to express a dark ambivalence towards their homeland: Faulkner, O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, S. Craig Zahler. Hawthorne's influence on the American horror film has been less prevalent than Poe's, but it still survives. Josephine Decker's Shirley certainly takes some of its cues from Hawthorne's forays into the forest in The Scarlet Letter.

Most American films before 1968 take a sunny view of rural Americana. John Ford's films with Will Rogers are a good example. However, there are exceptions. The Story of Temple Drake, an adaptation of Faulkner's Sanctuary, caused a furor in 1933. The film is dreck, but the subject matter is tawdry enough that it could be made today as an exploitation film. Other, better films with elements of rural Gothic Americana (such as Frank Borzage's Moonrise in 1948 and Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Psycho, etc.) reflect the rise of socially conscious films following the Second World War. America was more fully ready to face its dark side after the unspeakable horror of global conflict.  George Romero's The Night of the Living Dead, from 1968, signaled a further shift. Horror film's became a venue to express the counterculture's disgust with mainstream America. Films like Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes express a disquietude with a mutated primeval horror emanating from America's heartland. Other examples include Eaten Alive, Motel Hell, and even Deliverance. 

Eli Roth's Cabin Fever, from 2002, mixes several subgenres including American Gothic. The premise is that a group of comely recent college graduates shack up in a rural cabin and sinister events unfold. The obvious template is Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. Roth, in his directorial debut, even mimics Raimi's Steadicam shots whooshing through the forest. A mysterious toxin has infiltrated the local water leading to vomiting of blood, peeling of skin, and general body horror. The film, thus, shows it debts to the ecological horror of such films as Romero's The Crazies and The Toxic Avenger. The locals in Cabin Fever are uniformly distrustful, ignorant, and violent. One of the interlopers is greeted in the local burg with a bite on the arm by a seemingly rabid youngster.

I'm no fan of Roth's subsequent career, but Cabin Fever show promise. The camera set-ups are exactly judged and the cast of relative unknowns is well handled. The most stupid and macho of the grads is, presciently,  a proto MAGA figure, baseball cap and all. The film was received negatively for its mix of humor and horror, but I think the yuks are its saving grace. It is a pity that Mr. Roth's subsequent and more successful films seem to end up in torture chambers, but, then, I haven't seen 2018's The House with a Clock in Its Walls. 

Mia Goth in X

Ti West's recent X is a slightly better film with a slightly bigger budget. Mr. West had access to a crane and demonstrates he knows how to use it. An adult film crew rents a cottage on a rural property in 1979 and are soon besieged by the gothic couple who have resided there for decades; and their antsy gator. The body horror, juxtaposed with the nubile flesh of the porn stars, is more palpable than in Cabin Fever. The ancient couple seems to be decomposing before our eyes. X is a film geared to horror aficionados who can cite its antecedents rather than the general audience, but it represents a step forward for Mr. West. He has toiled making genre films, mostly horror, for over a decade and seems to have honed his sense of craft.

He is greatly helped by his lead, Mia Goth, who plays both one of the porn stars and a mad crone who has issues with physical decomposition. The roles allow her to show the full range of her talents. A woman who has worked with Lars von Trier and been married to Shia LaBeouf deserves our sympathy and consideration. While not a film I would recommend to strangers (or you Mom) , X resounded enough for horror fans to have spawned both a prequel, current release Pearl, and an upcoming sequel, MaXXXine. 

Son of Saul

                   

Laszlo Nemes' Son of Saul has rightly won kudos as one of the most interesting first features of recent vintage. A former assistant to Bela Tarr, Nemes has fashioned his Holocaust film as an immersive experience that eschews the uplifting survival tales that most releases concerning the Holocaust have employed. Like Tarr and Jancsó, Nemes employs long takes, often following his protagonist as he searches Auschwitz for a rabbi to give the Kaddish for his dead son.

Nemes' protagonist, Saul, is a camp helper whose vile tasks include herding the inmates to the gas chambers and disposing of their ashes. While his felloe Sonderkommandos fight for survival and plot a rebellion, the protagonist refuses "to put an amen to it" and quests instead for spiritual closure. His smile at the film's conclusion, when he and his comrades are moments from annihilation, seems to indicate he believes that he has found closure.

Nemes' subjective camera takes an emotional toll on the viewer. The camera and Saul are both boxed in, not privy to all the horrors around, but trapped and helpless. This seems to me a wise choice by the director. It may limit the film's accessibility, but conveys the abject terror and depravity of the death camps. Romantic escapism or expressionism is not an option if one wants to portray the Holocaust in all its dread. (6/5/16)

The Woman on the Beach

Robert Ryan and Joan Bennett in The Woman on the Beach

Jean Renoir's The Woman on the Beach, hist last Hollywood film from 1947, is not near his top rank, but stands as an stunningly surreal 71 minute B. The cast is chock full of talented regulars who never gained A status: Martha Hyer, Irene Ryan, Nan Leslie, Harry Harvey, Walter Sande, etc. Robert Ryan and Charles Bickford, always welcome sights, are two points of a triangle with Joan Bennett in her bad girl brunette period. Unfortunately, the script is sub-Freudian bunkum. The film was pared down, cutting away ridiculous dialogue, but preserving Renoir's spasms of subjective cinema where he attempts to get inside his character's heads: the opening dream sequence, those inside the ship or following footsteps.

Joan Bennett pretty much carries this one on her bony shoulders. She had reinvented herself by playing dark temptresses for émigré directors. Bickford just has to look crazed and Ryan available. Renoir said there was more improvisation on this film than any of his others, but thought he had chopped away too much after a poorly received preview. A murky misfire on the surface, there is more here than meets the eye. 

Bright Road

Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge in Bright Road

Gerald Mayer's Bright Road, a B feature from 1953, is more significant historically than artistically. Bright Road was the first screenplay based on the work of an African American, Mary Elizabeth Vroman, to be produced by a Hollywood studio. It also contains the first screen appearance of Harry Belafonte. Dorothy Dandridge, then one of the most popular nightclub singers in the country, is the film's star. Unfortunately, Bright Road proves that Hollywood films designed for African American audiences could be just as inane and formulaic as those made for white audiences.

The film is suffused with the liberal humanist uplift that was characteristic of MGM under the stewardship of Dore Schary. The film exists in a pre-integration, separate but equal cosmos where the only white character is the town doctor. It is set in an unnamed rural town in the South. Dandridge plays a schoolmarm and Belafonte, the school's principal. The roles are so refined as to seem Victorian. When Belafonte asks Dandridge for a date, it is to have an ice cream soda. This gentility extends to the, too few, musical numbers. Dandridge sings a lullaby based on a Tennyson poem while Belafonte sings a  restrained ballad.  The fieriness of both performers is much more in evidence the next year in Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones. 

The milieu of the film is the idealized white picket fence regionalism found on the MGM back lot. A fantasy land where the Becky Thatchers of town save the Tom Sawyers for civilization and the Huck Finns (and Stagolees) are a lost cause. The problem child of Bright Road is the academically challenged C.T. Despite his sullen challenge to authority, C.T. is a sensitive soul who enjoys drawing nature's creatures and keeping bees. The drama of Bright Road, such as it is, is whether neophyte teacher Dandridge can ignite the torch of learning for the young lad. Is there any doubt? The characters include a girl C.T. is sweet on who has a tell-tale cough and soon goes the way of Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Most of the scenes of the film take place in a classroom where a portrait of a paternal Booker T. Washington looks down. The film is extremely undynamic and proved too white bread, if you excuse the expression, even for 1953 audiences. Most of the child performers are more than adequate, though Belafonte seems stiff and ill at ease unless he is holding a guitar. The film failed to gain any career momentum for him and Dandridge, but, mercifully, it is only 69 minutes long.