Big Brown Eyes

Raoul Walsh's Big Brown Eyes is an above average programmer from 1936. The film mixes crime and comedy in a spritely 77 minutes. Big Brown Eyes features a romantic twosome of Joan Bennett and Cary Grant playing, respectively a manicurist and a police detective. The film feels off the cuff, concocted because two stars were available and needed a project that could be shot on the Paramount lot. However, despite (or because) of this, the film display the director's raffish charm and still underrated talents. 

Walsh helped write the screenplay, something he had done since the silent era, but abandoned soon after. The script has a lot of slang and rat-a-tat-tat patter, which both Bennett and Grant deliver with aplomb, full of ejaculations like "How's it, babe" and "Take a walk, flatfoot." Bennett and Grant seem relaxed with each other, Grant much less stiff than he was in most films earlier in the decade. Walsh has Bennett repeat a line from She Done Him Wrong, Grant's breakthrough film. Walsh had just directed Mae West in Klondike Annie and never took himself too seriously. You won't learn about film art if you read Walsh's autobiography, Each Man In His Time, but you will enjoy yourself and relish the talents of a master fabulist. Big Brown Eyes goes unmentioned, but so do most of the 140 films he directed.

The villains are well played by Walter Pidgeon and Lloyd Nolan. I enjoyed seeing Nolan as an up and comer, long before his talents calcified on television. Nolan ends up shooting a baby to death in the film, albeit accidently, but his character is oblivious to morality. The juxtaposition of heinous crime with humor may have contributed to Big Brown Eye's commercial failure, but it is consistent the the contradictory impulse of Walsh. As Jack Pickford allegedly said of Walsh, "Your idea of light comedy is to burn down a whorehouse."

For a maker of rugged adventures, Walsh was unusually sensitive to his actresses. Bennett is shown throughout to be certainly equal and maybe superior to Grant in acumen and ability. Bennett's character cracks the case and wins the guy. This is in part because Bennett was a bigger star than Grant at the time (but not for long), but also because of Walsh's even-handedness with the sexes. When Bennett lose her job as a manicurist, Grant is supportive of her new career in journalism and takes pride in her professionalism. This is not proclaimed as some progressive notion, but is embedded snugly in the film as part of the director's ethos.

Maybe I enjoyed Big Brown Eyes so much because I saw it on the heels of the woeful (and three hours long) Babylon. I certainly prefer Walsh's termite art approach as compared to Damian Chazelle's white elephant. The opening of Big Brown Eyes, which introduces the main characters and establishes the film's tone in a breezy minute, encapsulates Walsh's gifts. A 270 degree pan which traverses the salon where Bennett works, is followed by a montage of tilted angle close-ups in which the crew and customers of the salon comment in staccato like fashion on the film's plot. The device of the clientele and staff acting as a Greek chorus is repeated through the course of the film, adding to the sense of urban sophistication and syncopation. Unlike Chazelle's frenzied attempts at bravura camera movements, Walsh's far more economical and effective technique is off the cuff and tossed off, a cynosure of directorial assurance.

Big Brown Eyes is a Walter Wanger production. By 1940, Bennett had divorced her second husband and married Wanger. She turned into a brunette and gave her career a second wind as a femme fatale in Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, and The Reckless Moment, all produced by Wanger. However, a scandal in 1951, Wanger in a jealous rage shot Bennett's agent, Jennings Lang, sent Wanger to jail for four months. Bennett was unfairly branded with the scarlet A and her career never recovered. I remember seeing her on television's Dark Shadows and knowing, even in my youth, that this was the fate of a fallen star. After he was sprung, Wanger bounced back with worthy films such as Riot in Cell Block 11 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though he was ultimately undone by the debacle of Cleopatra. Still, very few producers had helped make as many masterpieces: in addition to the films listed above, he produced Queen Christina, History is Made at Night, Stagecoach, Foreign Correspondent, The Long Voyage Home, Canyon Passage, and The Black Book. Big Brown Eyes is a trifle compared to these, but still worth a gander. 

Magic Mike's Last Dance

           
Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike's Last Dance finds the cathartic incandescence of the first two films dimmed by repetition. The film opens with Mike (Channing Tatum) down at his heels after losing his furniture store during the Covid epidemic. Tending bar at a benefit, he meets Max (Salma Hayek), a wealthy divorcee who, after learning of Mike's talents, requests a command performance. Intrigued by the big lug, she totes him to London and finances his direction of an epic strip show at a theatrical venue.

What we are left with is the umpteenth version of the "let's put on a show" musical. As in the first two films, the dance routines are kinetic and fun. However, there is little else going on. The economic desperation underlying the strippers lives is not as palpable as in the first two films. The dancers Mike and Max hire are game, but anonymous. This is especially noticeable when the dancers from the first two films share a zoom call with Mike.

However, the main weakness of the film is the romantic relationship between Max and Mike. It is difficult to believe that the romance is anything more than a plot device. Tatum's role fits him like a Speedo at this point, but Hayek's character is never believable despite the fact that the role closely resembles Hayek's real life status as the wife of a wealthy mogul. Hayek has proven she can portray a believably sensual woman (in Frida and Ask the Dust, among others), but her character seems to be more a treatise on feminine empowerment than a flesh and blood creature.

Along Came Jones

             
Stuart Heisler's Along Came Jones, from 1945, is an unfunny Western parody, produced by its star, Gary Cooper. Actually, the title of the film reads "Nunnally Johnson's" Along Came Jones, crediting the film's screenwriter who was riding high after the success of his scripts for The Grapes of Wrath, Roxie Hart, and The Woman in the Window. Johnson had just collaborated with Cooper on Casanova Brown. Along Came Jones' script was based on the novel Useless Cowboy by Alan Le May. Le May had been writing novels for twenty years at that point and had helped concoct a few scripts for Cecil B. DeMille. Numerous books of his were turned into movies including John Ford's The Searchers and John Huston's The Unforgiven. 

The film's plot is moronic, hinging on mistaken identity. Cooper's character is mistook for outlaw Dan Duryea, but neither hilarity or even mild amusement ensues. The film is predicated on Cooper's charm, the twist is that his character lacks basic gunfighting skills, but he offers a lazy, apathetic performance. Director Heisler, returning to Hollywood after wartime service, had had a promising start to his career at Paramount with The Biscuit Eater and The Glass Key, but his direction here lacks any satiric bite. The film is ludicrously set bound, employing inferior matte painting and rear projection. Every time Cooper and his sidekick, played by William Demarest, trot on down the trail, the rear projection footage is so jarring that the artificiality of the scenes leap off the screen. An indication of the film's scant value is that Loretta Young, who was pregnant during the shoot, gives the best performance. The best scene in the picture is Young rolling a cigarette for a wounded Duryea, a sign of the paucity of its entertainment value. Along Came Jones had some moderate critical and commercial success, but Cooper never produced another picture.

Macario

His candle flickering low, Macario consults with Death

Roberto Gavaldon's Macario, released in 1960, is a first class fable based on a B. Traven novella. Traven's tale was published in 1950 in German and was based on Mexican folklore. It is also a variant of the Everyman morality plays. The work has been translated into English as "The Third Guest" or "The Healer". The film balances well its supernatural elements with a focus on the plight of the Mexican proletariat, a hallmark of Traven's work whoever he was.

Macario (Ignacio Lopez Tarso) is a rural peasant who is struggling to provide for his family in 18th Century New Spain. Macario gathers wood for the local bakery while his wife, who has no spoken name and is played by Pina Pellicer, helps make ends meet by working as a laundress. They struggle to feed their five children, much less themselves. The film begins as the locals prepare to celebrate the Day of the Dead. Food is laid out as an offering which only heightens Macario and his wife's sense of impoverishment. Fed up, so to speak, Macario vows to go on a hunger strike until he can have a whole roasted turkey to himself.

His wife is so convinced of her husband's resolve that she filches a turkey and roasts it for Macario. Macario takes to the hinterlands to enjoy his repast in peace, but is interrupted by three mysterious figures representing Satan, God, and Death. Each tries to barter with Macario, offering various temptations for half of the turkey. Because of his empathy for Death, who resembles a starving peasant, Macario accepts his bargain. Death gives Macario a healing elixir; with certain conditions, naturally. The first is that Macario will receive only a finite amount of the liquid. Once it's gone, it's gone for good. The second proviso is that the elixir can only be used on certain parties. If Death appears at the foot of the bed of a patient, Macario can administer the magic potion. If Death is at the head of the bed, the patient is doomed and Macario's elixir is of no use. Of course, it is never a good idea to make a deal with Death or Satan and I'm not that sure about God.

Once Macario begins using his healing powers, word begins to spread and his fortune is made. Predictably, wealth does not bring happiness to Macario and his missus. The forces of Western enlightenment band together to stop this obvious charlatan and Macario is arrested and brought before an inquisitorial tribunal. His only hope is to save the life of the Viceroy's ailing son, but Death remains obdurate. It is a tribute to Gavaldon and his collaborators that the film runs true to Traven's fatalism in the concluding reel.

Tarso was distinguished stage actor who went on to be a mainstay of Mexican cinema. Saddled with a goofy wig, Tarso offers a stolidly underplayed performance. He is the static center of the film and Gavaldon wisely constructs the film around him. Tarso's stoic gaze as he sees a turkey being basted is proof positive of the Kuleshov effect. 

Pina Pellicer is a different kettle of fish. Her haunting beauty was used expressively here and in Marlon Brando's One Eyed Jacks which was shot before Macario, but released after, due to Brando's tinkering. Pellicer's face expresses the anguish of their impoverishment as opposed to Tarso's stoic mask. Also in contrast to Tarso, Pellicer had a tragically abbreviated career. Struggling with depression, she committed suicide in 1964. Her performances in One Eyed Jacks and Macario are a testament to what possibilities were lost.

Pina Pellicer

Another of the great talents connected with the film was the revered cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa who shot over 200 films in a fifty year career. The Day of the Dead sequences resembles documentary footage, but the interiors boast magnificent chiaroscuro effects that give this fable more depth, literally and thematically. 

One further thing that struck me watching Macario was the universality of the rituals and tropes utilized. Mexican Catholicism absorbed many pre-Christian traditions. The offerings of food on the Day of the Dead resembles that of the pujas I witnessed in Asia. Likewise, the supernatural figures who tempt Macario are not dissimilar to those in European folk tales; something Traven, who was probably of German origin, was surely familiar with. Macario was the first Mexican film nominated for Best Foreign Language film. It lost the Oscar to Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring which is also a mix of Christian and pagan themes, as is The Seventh Seal. 

Epidemic

Lars von Trier in Epidemic

Lars von Trier's Epidemic, from 1987, is a self-reflexive film about filmmaking. The film stars the director himself as he hastily assembles a screenplay in collaboration with Ole Ernst. These scenes are shot in 16mm black and white and show the pair drinking with gusto, doing research on medieval epidemics, and driving to Germany to visit Udo Kier. In juxtaposition are scenes from the screenplay shot in 35mm black and white. These again feature von Trier as "Dr. Mesmer" in a modern dress rendering of a medieval plague story shot like an UFA film. 

The overbearing Danish director is trying to address the fissure in his work between his commercial and avant-garde impulses. The film is branded with the title trademark emblazoned on the screen through most of the film. Perhaps this doesn't seem as jarring today when corporate logos are ever present on the screen during network broadcasts, but the effect is a cri de coeur concerning the director's ambivalence towards film as a product. This movie is entertaining in fits and starts. It is telling that von Trier opines at one point, "A film ought to be like a pebble in your shoe." No rainbows or butterflies for the audience from Lars, then.

His recent diagnosis of Parkinson's disease threatens to thwart the career of a genuine talent. Epidemic has the usual themes of his work (hospitals and disease, trauma, hypnosis as film and film as hypnosis), but the film lacks the thematic power and narrative drive of his best works, The Element of Crime and Melancholia. James Agee consoled Stanley Kubrick after the premiere of his first film, Fear and Desire, that it "had too many good things in it to be called arty." Epidemic is arty to a fault.

A Bigger Splash

Matthias Schoenaerts and Tilda Swinton in A Bigger Splash

Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash reunites him with his I am Love star Tilda Swinton who plays a rock star recovering from throat surgery on the isle of Pantelleria, midway between Sicily and Tunisia. She is with her younger lover, up and coming Belgian thesp Mattias Schoenaerts, and they bide their time making love and lolling naked by the pool. Their idyll is ruptured by the arrival of Ralph Fiennes, a former squeeze of Swinton who brings a young cookie (Dakota Johnson) in tow that he claims is his daughter. Erotic intrigue supposedly commences. 

The Fiennes character is the nexus of the film. It's a showy role of a charismatic showbiz hustler whose manic energy barely disguises his desperation. The backstory of his character and Swinton's relationship is told (somewhat) in flashbacks and we learn Fiennes urged Schoenaerts to pursue Swinton after she dumped Fiennes. However, Fiennes is not over Swinton and seems to be using his "daughter" as bait to lure Schoenaerts away.

Swinton is superb, alternately regal and vulnerable. Fiennes lacks the charisma to light up his role. Accordingly, the erotic fireworks fizzle. He does have a saturnine quality that is good for villainy, but overdoes his character's neediness. His character seems more irritating than intriguing. Schoenaerts is good in an underwritten part, but Johnson is an unconvincing vamp. Her presence reminds me of one of my favorite recent film reviews. My mother-in-law on Fifty Shades of Grey: "He's sick and she's stupid."

Guadagnino gets some nice color out of Pantelleria, but whiffs badly interjecting a refugee subplot. The film is an intermittently entertaining diversion, but lacks suspense and invention. (9/16/16)

B'twixt Now and Sunrise

Elle Fanning

Francis Ford Coppola's B'twixt Now and Sunrise is an unsuccessful horror film which Coppola has been tinkering with for over ten years. Shot in 2011 and briefly released under the title Twixt, the film follows a low rent horror novelist named Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer) on a book tour of Northern California. During the tour, he becomes fixated on an old mass murder case. In his dreams, Baltimore is haunted by a mysterious girl (Elle Fanning) and the specter of Edgar Poe (Ben Chaplin).

Unfortunately, the narrative makes even less sense than the one in Coppola's Dementia 13. Chaplin and Fanning are quite game, but Kilmer seems lost and ill at ease. Best in show is Bruce Dern as a batty sheriff. I enjoyed Coppola's expressionist mise-en-scene, reminiscent of Rumblefish and Bram Stoker's Dracula, but the end result resembles a bad Gut Maddin film.  
 

Vigilante Force

If you asked me in 1976 if I thought George Armitage's Vigilante Force was a good film, I would have snorted in derision. Such a question about an undeniably tawdry and mindless exploitation film was not worth answering or even considering. Nothing is more rigid than a closed mind and I have been trying to pry mine open ever since. At the time, I thought John Updike had more to say about America than Hank Williams. I feel differently now. Similarly, Vigilante Force is the same as it ever was, but my regard for it has shifted.

The film is a sleazy vigilante flick, produced by Roger Corman's brother and shot in the not too scenic Simi Valley area in about a month. The two leads, Kris Kristofferson and Jan-Michael Vincent, are not strong or adept actors. Vincent may have been the worst leading actor of his era. His deficiencies are so numerous that they detract from even the few adequate film he appeared in, like The Mechanic. At least in 1976 Vincent hadn't begun the mass destruction of his brain cells. Kristofferson does have genuine charisma and sex appeal. He struts through most of Vigilante Force with his shirt off. Unbelievably, the duo are cast as brothers.

The lead females are Victoria Principal as Vincent's girlfriend and Bernadette Peters as a prostitute who hooks up with Kristofferson. When I first saw the film I thought these were one note stereotypical roles and I was right, but I missed how much Armitage drew out of his performers. Principal, a limited performer, is far more believable and warm here than she ever was on Dallas. Peters plays the moral conscience of the film. Initially enamored with Kristofferson's character, she rejects him when she discovers that he is an icy sociopath. I adored the period detail of Peters dribbling Fresca on a masher's arm. Peters' character has aspirations as a singer and she has to pretend to be a lousy vocalist for most of the film, most entertainingly with Dick Miller as her scabrous accompanist. I feel Peters' talents would have been better served in an earlier Hollywood era, as would have Sam Elliott's. Peters' performance in Vigilante Force has a bruised ruefulness that reminds me of Claire Trevor

Vigilante Force's plot is fairly boilerplate. The town of "Elk Hill" in California is awash in oil money. The downside to this is that the easy money has attracted roughnecks who have no respect for small town values. Elk Hill becomes lawless and after two cops are murdered, the town fathers hire Kristofferson's Aaron (as in Burr) Arnold, a Vietnam vet, to clean up town. This he and his thuggish hippie minions do ruthlessly. However, their masquerade as deputies is merely a front for criminal activity. Ultimately, they plan an elaborate payroll heist to occur on the Fourth of July, When Vincent's character, Ben (as in Benedict) Arnold, gets wind of the plan, he bands together the titular militia to thwart it.

The Bicentennial trappings of the film are no accident. This is a film, akin to Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story and Walking Tall, that addresses small town corruption in America. It is significant that most of the old coots Ben recruits are dressed as Minutemen for the parade. Armitage sees them not as proto Tea Party members, but as upholders of beleaguered American values in the corporate era. It is telling that the town's leading citizens all have pictures of oil derricks behind their desks.

None of this would matter if this ridiculous violent fantasy were not directed with gusto. Armitage gives us a shit-kicking portrait of the blue collar side of Southern California. Physical movement is writ large across the streets and many saloons in the picture. The choreography of the shootouts and bar fights is colorful and Jack Fisk's art direction is superb. Armitage didn't foresee the Tea Party, but he does illustrate corporate greed and the rural/urban divide. As one of the townies puts it, "If I wanted to live with degenerates, I'd move to L.A.". Vigilante Force will satisfy fans of debased genres. It would sit well on a double bill with Monte Hellman's Cockfighter. 

Blood of the Virgin

                         

Sammy Harkham's Blood of the Virgin is an outstanding graphic novel, worthy of comparison to Maus and American Splendor. The book's primary focus is on a fledgling filmmaker trying to make it in the biz in 1971 by shooting a low-budget horror film, but the book ranges widely in time, setting, and scope. Harkham's portrait of the film business is sharp without being snarky. Even when members of his enormous cast of characters are misbehaving, Harkham is at pains to remind us that they, and we, all have our reasons. Highly Recommended.

The Brass Legend

Hugh O'Brian has Raymond Burr behind bars in The Brass Legend

Gerd Oswald's The  Brass Legend, from 1956, is a superb B Western. A morality play, The Brass Legend's script, by Don Martin, juxtaposes how the sheriff hero and an assortment of villains' view death and Oswald expertly conveys the material. The miscreants view death as the inevitable failed result of their perpetual quest to best their fellow male predators. much like the juvenile lead pretends to do in make believe gunfights. In contrast, the film's anguished hero takes a more adult view of death. Each of the four killings he commits in the film takes a psychic toll on him that is made visible. The shocks and traumas of the era are mentioned in verbal asides about the Civil War and the Johnson County War. Violence looms.

Hugh O'Brian plays the film's hero, Sheriff Wade Addams. O'Brian was just beginning as successful run on Television as Wyatt Earp. His role in The Brass Legend is not that dissimilar to his Earp, but it is far, far grimmer. Addams is so haunted by the threat of violence looming over himself in his role as Sheriff that his face becomes a mask of resolute despair. O'Brian delivers his best performance in a role that displays a talent not often on display in a host of uninspiring films. Sheriff Addams' troubles with his girlfriend stem primarily from his devotion to his professional duties. A comparison to a similar trope in High Noon shows the more subtle power of The Brass Legend. Like Rio Bravo, a conscious riposte to High Noon, The Brass Legend is a superior variant of the Fred Zinnemann flick. Even with B wattage names, as opposed to Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, the relationship between O'Brian and the winning Nancy Gates (Comanche Station) is the more believable and palpable romantic union.  

Another thing in The Brass Legend's favor is that it has a more memorable villain than High Noon. Tris Hatten relishes the freedom and booty of his outlaw life. Raymond Burr's career, starting after World War 2, offers an impressive roster of checkered characters in films as unsung as Pitfall, The Blue Gardenia, and Ruthless plus more heralded films such as A Place in the Sun and Rear Window. He is quite good in The Brass Target, with the chance to show off a more physical aspect of his talents. He was versatile enough to range from modern noirs to period oaters. His success as Perry Mason led him away from feature films. He would reunite with Oswald rewardingly in the 1957's Crime of Passion, which features Barbara Stanwyck, before springing unjustly accused defendants for all eternity.

Part of what makes Tris Hatten so frightening is how playful and normal seeming he is. Jovial and talkative, he even expresses admiration for the boy who divulged his hideout to the sheriff. However, after a violent jailbreak, the mask hiding Hatten's psychopathology falls. Hatten's wounded cellmate has a derringer hidden in his boot and Hatten uses it to disarm an elderly deputy and gain his freedom. The deputy is played by Russell Simpson, a beloved and aged (he was 77) supporting player whose career dated to the silent era. He is most famous for playing Pa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. He is called "Pops" in The Brass Legend. Oswald's closeup of Simpson's face through the bars when he realizes Hatten has the drop on him emphasizes the rings around Simpson's eyes and his doddering vulnerability. Once he is free, Hatten seizes the opportunity to repeatedly pistol whip Pops. Beneath a charming façade lurks a psychopath and Burr is adept at showing us both sides of the coin. When, after the inevitable showdown, Hatten lies dying, he asks the sheriff if he winged him. Reassured that he did, Hatten dies happily in the knowledge that he was barely bested; a childish reaction surely.

The Brass Legend was shot hurriedly and has little in the way of production values. If the film's town looks familiar, it is because it was filmed at the Ray Corrigan Ranch, a set used in over four hundred Westerns. Oswald career had a brief flurry in feature films before petering out into episodic television work. Like Hugh O'Brian, Oswald worked in a large number of projects that were unworthy of his abilities. The threat of violence hangs over his standout films as it did over America during the Cold War. I heartily recommend A Kiss Before Dying, a Technicolor noir,  and his western Rashomon, Valerie. Complete cultists might want to search out his mid-Eighties Twilight Zone episode, 'The Beacon". This Shirley Jackson knockoff features Charlie Martin Smith and Martin Landau. The Brass Legend has sunk into such obscurity that it doesn't have a rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The plus side is that it is currently streaming on Tubi. 

Trumbo

             

Jay Roach's Trumbo, from 2015, is an anodyne biopic about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo served a year in prison on a contempt of Congress conviction after refusing to answer questions about his Communist party activities before HUAC. John McNamara's vapid screenplay is an unsearching celebration of the writer as a free speech champion. A sense of the period is attempted as newsreel footage is mixed uneasily with recreations, but the film's conjuring of the era is superficial. Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, and the Rosenbergs make appearances, but Alger Hiss goes unmentioned and the issue of Communist party infiltration of Hollywood unions is skirted.

None of this would matter if the film's central figure was compelling, but I found Cranston's portrayal of Trumbo to be a little wan. Trumbo is shown largely ignoring his domestic duties, swilling Scotch and Benzedrine in the bathtub as he types his screenplays. The production team must have thought Cranston would foot the bill here. Cranston as Walter White played a man who lost his soul as he gained the world and there was a bit of that in Trumbo. However, there was a tetchy grandiloquence and irascibility to Trumbo that Cranston doesn't quite evoke. Now the fault probably lies in the screenwriter's desire to paint Trumbo as a heroic figure. The rough edges of Trumbo's past and personality have been planed. No mention is made of Trumbo's isolationism or his support for the Nazi/Soviet non-aggression pact.

Jay Roach has worked primarily on comic material such as the Austin Powers films. He doesn't bring too much to the table here, but is able to generate a musical rhythm in the verbal give and take of his players, particularly between Cranston and Louis C. K. as the composite character, Arlen Hird. Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper, Christian Berkel as Otto Preminger, Dean O'Gorman as Kirk Douglas and John Goodman as Frank King are all entertaining. However, too many members of the ultra talented cast are left with little to do: Diane Lane, Elle Fanning, Alan Tudyk, and Stephen Root pretty much just stand around as Trumbo pontificates. Michael Stuhlbarg is somewhat miscast as Edward G. Robinson, but is able to capture the ambivalence of a fellow traveler who named names. Only David James Elliott as John Wayne is an outright disaster.

Chiefly because of its outstanding cast, Trumbo held my attention throughout. Chronicling a writer on film is a difficult task. A writer hunched over a typewriter or a manuscript is not a particularly cinematic or dramatic image. Still, Trumbo is a well intentioned, probably too well intentioned, civics lesson and not a particularly entertaining or profound film. I also found a "tradition of quality" bias that I didn't like in the film. Prestige productions that Trumbo worked on such as The Brave One and even Roman Holiday are inferior to such B pictures that Trumbo castigates as The Prowler and Gun Crazy. 

Japanese Summer: Double Suicide

Keiko Sakurai in Japanese Summer: Double Suicide

Nagisa Oshima's Japanese Summer: Double Suicide is a protopunk protest film with surrealistic touches. This 1967 feature is my favorite Oshima film of the 60s, but I have to cop to being lukewarm to the director. Oshima's narratives always seem haphazard and arbitrary to me. It is as if he is more interested in broadcasting his themes into the viewer's cranium than constructing plausible or even comprehensible plotlines. 

...Double Suicide is fairly incoherent even for Oshima. A deserter named Otoko, who is fixated on suicide, crosses paths with a nymphomaniac named Nejiko and, yes, that description pretty much sums up her character (shades of Fuller's Shock Corridor). That Otoko and Nejiko meet on an elevated urban highway makes little sense in terms of logic, but allows the director leeway to offer dream-like vignettes satirizing his country's militant nationalism. For Oshima is not interested in his characters per se, but in shedding light on the malaise of Japanese society.

Otoko is an introvert seeking self-annihilation, he is kin to Camus' Meursault. Kei Sato gives an appropriately self-effacing performance as Otoko. He would have been a better Meursault than the overly charismatic Mastroianni in Visconti's L'Etranger, released that same year. As Nejiko, Keiko Sakura is fine as long as she is in motion, frugging and schtupping her way across the widescreen. She boasts about her forty inch bust and it is on ample display. Unfortunately, when Nejiko is stationary and has to recite her lines, her limitations become immediately apparent. She only appeared in four feature films. 

Nejiko and Otoko happen upon a group of gangsters digging up a cache of guns. The gangsters are anticipating a fracas with some rivals. For some dubious reason, they hold Nejiko and Otoko hostage in the proverbial abandoned warehouse. A teenager, obsessed with shooting a rifle, begs to join the gang. So, for the main part of the film, we are stuck in a room with nine men carrying varying amounts of anger and one exceedingly randy moll. 

The various men offer monologues chiefly concerned with violent death. Oshima's timing and spacing of these sequences are expert, the corroded setting mirrors the sense of spiritual decay. For this is Oshima's theme: the death wish of the Japanese male. The gangsters follow the news on television about a shooting spree perpetuated by a visiting American. His sniping at the populace ruffles the gangsters and they soon begin knocking each other off. The few that are left join the American, who looks like a Beach Boy, and they all die in a hail of bullets.

My rational side cannot fully endorse ...Double Suicide, but I cannot deny its unconscious power. As in Godard's concurrent Weekend, in which capitalistic culture is also seemingly on the verge of collapse, there is a feeling that a violent revolution is a convulsive spasm away. Now Godard and Oshima proved to be poor fortune tellers, but they captured the revolutionary fervor of the era. The corridors and rooms in ...Double Suicide are places where both gangsters and revolutionary cells can plot stratagems. The film suffers from a reliance on the mod effects of the eras, I could have done without Oshima's whip pans. However, my intimation of Sam Fuller earlier was not accidental. ...Double Suicide shares the pulpy, B movie punch of Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss.

Jim, The Man with the Scar

Heinz Ruhmann in Jim, The Man with the Scar

A madcap black comedy from 1931, Robert Siodmak's Jim, The Man with the Scar is available on a Kino Classics Blu-ray under the equally unwieldy title, The Man in Search of his Murderer. Whatever the moniker, what we have left of the film is truncated, only 53 minutes of the original 97 remain. Adapted from a play by three screenwriters, the film opens with a despondent nebbish, Hans, about to end his life with a revolver. The present opening is so abrupt that one must surmise some establishing scenes are among the missing reels. Hans is interrupted by a burglar who agrees to off Hans for a fee. Hans is played by Heinz Ruhmann, a veteran actor who amassed over 100 film credits and who resembles a mopey Harold Lloyd without Lloyd's physical dexterity. Hans soon regrets the deal after meeting the fetching Miss Kitty (Lien Deyers, best known for her role in Fritz Lang's Spione) at a nightclub.

Jim, The Man with the Scar is an entertaining farce that resembles nothing else in Siodmak's filmography. It skims about with manic energy and contains three very different and very unusual musical numbers. What the film does resemble, particularly in its mordant humor and sarcastic tone, is the later work of one of its screenwriters, Billy Wilder. Indeed, the car chase in the film closely resembles one in Wilder's One, Two, Three. There is also an M reference thrown into the mix; Hans gets an x chalked on his jacket instead of an m. Jim, The Man with the Scar is, ultimately, a mangled trifle, but enjoyable nevertheless. 

Hard to be a God

Alexsey German's Hard to Be a God is a singular film, at once magnificent and mad. It is nominally a sci-fi film in which scientists from Earth are observing the inhabitants of an alien world that resembles the worst aspects of medieval Europe. The scientists are supposed to not interfere with the evolutionary arc of the inhabitants, but, of course, are sorely tempted to.

The world of the planet is a Brueghelian nightmare: Clean water and healthy food are impossible to find, intolerance and brutality are omnipresent, the climate is unpleasant and cretinism abounds. German provides us with a succession of grotesque images that are reminiscent of Fellini at his most unbridled.

The plot is virtually nonexistent and the pacing shambolic. This is because the film's protagonist, Don Remata, is leading an alienated life, out of touch with the ethos and comforts of life on his home planet. Like numerous Conrad characters and Harvey Keitel's character in Jane Campion's The Piano, he has gone native; heading backwards on the human chain of evolutionary progress. He commingles with the locals and they attempt to serve their newfound God, but lack the intelligence to be able to do more than get in his way. Don Remata's day to day existence with his retinue is claustrophobic. He is constantly banging his head on hanging buckets, bones, and meat. He emulates the locals in following his lowest and basest needs: Clearing his orifices, getting stoned, channeling his aggression at idiots, and seeking warmth. If Don and his cohorts have a quest, it is a quixotic one.

The narrative is unsatisfying. Perhaps this is due to German's premature death, perhaps it is because of the film's commitment to monotony. The film's power is an experiential one, however unpleasant. Art direction and costumes are superb. One may not want to grok the grotty texture of Hard to Be a God, but one cannot deny the singular nature of the film's vision. (11/6/16)

Cloak and Dagger

Gary Cooper and Lilli Palmer on the run in Cloak and Dagger

Fritz Lang's Cloak and Dagger is a routine espionage thriller from 1946. Lang could make the turning of a doorknob suspenseful, which he does here, but the material is subpar. The film's source was a non-fiction book about the OSS. At least four credited writers toiled to turn a sketchy premise into a Eric Ambler type spy yarn and failed. The plot is ludicrous and the players mouth bromides. After a prologue in which we see a French resistance cell being obliterated, Gary Cooper, playing a physics professor at a Midwestern University, is recruited by the OSS to help smash the Nazi atomic program. Lawrence Kasdan must have had this film in the back of his mind when he penned a similar scene for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Cooper first tries to extract a Hungarian nuclear physicist from Switzerland and then is transported by submarine to Italy to aid another beleaguered scientist. There he joins a resistance group that includes Lilli Palmer, Robert Alda, and Dan Seymour. Cooper is given too much expository dialogue and has little chemistry with Palmer. Palmer, in her first Hollywood film, is about as Italian as a Sacher torte, but is game. Alda is more than adequate in a nothing role. Seymour, as usual, fills the background nicely.

By 1946, American filmgoers were tiring of World War 2 flicks. That and the ho hum nature of Cloak and Dagger itself led to a tepid commercial response. Compared to the concurrent Notorious, the film offers a simple minded view of the spy game with none of the ambiguousness and perverse beauty of the Hitchcock film. On the horizon, HUAC loomed. Cloak and Dagger' two principle writers, Ring Lardner Jr. and Albert Maltz, were both part of the Hollywood Ten and were imprisoned and blacklisted. Cooper testified as a friendly witness before HUAC, stating "From what I hear about communism, I don't like it because it isn't on the level." However, he didn't name names and went out of his way to defend embattled screenwriter, Carl Foreman. Carl Sandburg waspishly said that Cooper was "one of the most beloved illiterates this country has ever known."

The Fabelmans

Gabriel LaBelle in The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans is a teeming Whitman sampler of a movie. His most personal film, how could it not be, it contains both the best and worst of the auteur. The film is a shadow play of memories, just like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance which the teenaged Spielberg and his pals watch. In this respect, the film is unassailable. How can we begrudge the man his memories. Production values are outstanding and the cast is generally good, though Seth Rogan's performance once again displays Spielberg's lack of feel for comedy.

I generally enjoyed the film, but I think it shows Spielberg's limitations. As in nearly all of his films, ambiguity and subtlety are not to be found. Mom (Michelle Williams) is the artistic half of the Spielberg equation while Dad (Paul Dano) bequeaths his love of technological gadgetry to his son and never the twain shall meet. There is a sense of inflation in the film which suffers from overstatement and over explication. Mom doesn't play a gorgeous classical tune on the piano once, she does it thrice so that there is no chance that we won't grasp that she is an artistic soul straightjacketed by assuming the role of a suburban housewife.

Furthermore, Spielberg and frequent collaborator Tony Kushner over stuff the film with incidents that cause it to be overlong and, at times, ponderous. A tornado, a pet monkey, Judd Hirsch, Michelle Williams dancing by the campfire, a marijuana sequence that seems premature historically: there is too much going on and it makes it seems like the project was so personal that no one was suggesting the necessary cuts.

Still, I am too much of a movie buff to not appreciate Spielberg showing how the dream factory of Hollywood shaped his consciousness and branded itself upon his brain. The sequences showing showing the impact of The Greatest Show on Earth on the young tyro testify to the sense of childlike wonder that is Spielberg's stock in trade. David Lynch's salty cameo as John Ford is the kind of piss and vinegar coda the film begged for, preventing it from becoming the overlong campfire marshmallow Spielberg often produces.

 

The Girl and the Spider

Henriette Confurius as Mara in The Girl and the Spider

Ramon and Silvan Zurcher's The Girl and the Spider is a worthy follow up to The Strange Little Cat. Lisa, a twenty something resident of Bern, is leaving the apartment she shares with Mara to move into another flat with her boyfriend, Markus. The film chronicles the moving out and in process, plus a wingding put on to celebrate the move. The film features over a dozen characters, some denizens of the two apartment complexes, as they cross paths, often literally, with Mara and Lisa.

The film also focuses, like the Zurcher brother's first film, on the animals that share these lofts with the humans. A parallel is drawn between the two. The human characters, like the so-called lesser beasts, mark their territory and leave their imprint. This is especially true of Mara who is obviously none too happy with Lisa's departure and acts out her resentment in various petty, passive aggressive ways. The film is full of micro aggressions and fleeting flirtations by all the characters, man or beast. As in The Strange Little Cat, the Zurcher's present the space of the film as a field of conflict in which the various members of the animal kingdom, ever watchful of each other, vie for dominion. 

Book Review: City of Nets by Otto Friedrich

Bertolt Brecht testifying before HUAC

Otto Friedrich's City of Nets is an impressive survey history of Hollywood in the 1940s. By a survey history, I mean Friedrich did not do any primary research for the book, but relied on secondary sources. Friedrich takes a perverse pride in having done no interviews for the book. As he puts:

         Surely there is no one of any importance in Hollywood, dead or alive, who has not been

          interrogated over and over again. And in no other field of history, not in Hitler's Berlin

          or in Roosevelt's Washington, have so many interviews grown into so many

          ghost-written autobiographies. (pg. xi)

                              

Almost forty years have elapsed since Friedrich wrote these words and we have been even more deluged since. I recently plowed my way through the 768 pages of Hollywood: The Oral History and was shocked by how few nuggets I gleaned and how anodyne the result was. Still, I will read almost anything about the titans of Hollywood's Golden Age. Peter Biskind's My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles is scurrilous bunkum, but it conveys the spirit of the subjects. So, you pays your money and you take your chance.

Friedrich majored in history at Harvard and gives City of Nets a sense of historical sweep. The book is the best survey history I've read since Eric Foner's Reconstruction. Friedrich is tart and economical, a much more stylish writer than most historians. Friedrich worked primarily as a journalist, he was The Saturday Evening Post's last managing editor, and City of Nets' bibliography is impressively lengthy and wide-ranging: from Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon to Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience, from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to Lana Turner's Lana: The Lady, The Legend, The Truth. Friedrich is a scrupulous and appropriately incredulous scholar. When perspectives differ on events, he is only too glad to provide contrasting viewpoints. He is especially strong on the Hollywood émigré community, American anti-Semitism, and the decline of the film business. Some aspects of the book have dated. City of Nets' sections on HUAC and the rise of the blacklist don't give us as full and rich picture as J. Hoberman's An Army of Phantoms.

The only facet of the book that stuck in my craw was Friedrich's condescension to the fruits of Hollywood labor. Neil Gabler picked up on this in his 1986 review in The New York Times. Friedrich opines that "MGM was in the business of producing rubbish." (pg. 318) A flippant judgement that I might be more inclined to agree with if he had replaced the word rubbish with kitsch. I do take exception to his opinion that "To Have and Have Not wasn't a particularly good movie." (pg. 242) Friedrich's  highbrow view of Hollywood's output was, and still is, commonplace amongst American intellectuals. It is why Friedrich gravitates to portraying practitioners of what were then known as the high arts who ended up in Hollywood: Faulkner, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Mann, and Brecht whose Mahagonny provides City of Nets with its title. Émigré directors are mentioned once in passing: Siodmak, Renoir, Clair, Ophuls, and Duvivier. Douglas Sirk draws nary a mention.

Despite my auteurist demurrals, City of Nets is a worthy book. It belongs on the shelf with those authors who have given us the most compelling portraits of twentieth century LA: Hammett, Chandler, Babitz, Didion, Ellroy, Mosely and Jean Stein's West Of Eden.  

Tomorrow

                
Joseph Anthony's Tomorrow, from 1972, contains an unforgettable performance by Robert Duvall, but I found it to be a barely satisfactory film. I've always regarded Horton Foote as too corny for my taste and his adaptation defangs Faulkner. The film seems to emanate from the 1950s, not because it is in black and white or because it is crude technically, but because it suffers from an Actors Studio staginess. The lead female, Olga Bellin, channels Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie and this upends most of her scenes.

Apparently, from what I've read, no one on the set could control Ms. Bellin. The fault lies then with Mr. Anthony not being a strong enough director. A contention I feel qualified to maker just by seeing one of his other films, the pallid The Rainmaker. Anthony captures actors' performances, but little else. The camera setups frame actors reciting dialogue, but lend little to scenes except decorative realism. When the camera pans, it simply follows the action. Anthony never endeavors to use film technique expressively. Now I don't feel one needs to employ camera movement or jazzy editing to make an expressive film, Dreyer's Gertrud is an equally pacific film that I find cinematically provocative and moving, but a director should employ cinematic mean for cinematic ends.

If I am being overly harsh on this film, it is because it is a muffed opportunity. Duvall, who played the part on stage, burrows so deeply into the role that he seems to personify the virtues of love and endurance that Faulkner sought to portray. His great performance is reason enough to see Tomorrow.