I Saw the TV Glow

Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine

I can see both what admirers and detractors found in Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow. Overall, I found the film to be an advancement over her premier feature, We're All Going to the World's Fair, but I still have quibbles. Chief among those is the comatose performance by lead Justice Smith. I get that Smith's character is uneasy in his own skin, but that doesn't mean he has to be uneasy with his line readings. Compare Smith's readings of his monologues with that of co-star Brigette Lundy-Paine and one can judge the competence of the respective performers. I also thought the film had pacing problems throughout. I especially disliked Schoenbrun's cutting away from the two leads crucial dialogue during the "Double Lunch" sequence to show the musical performances at the club. I get that Schoenbrun wanted to show off the big time rock stars she had recruited for the film, but thought the cuts from the dialogue to the musical performers detracted from the sequence.

However, the mise en scene of the movie is continually impressive. The "bisexual lighting" of the film is apt for this allegory of queer unconsciousness cracking into consciousness. Even little touches, like the Fruitopia vending machine, lend the film the appropriate coloring and thematic weight. The TV show that the leads bond over, entitled The Pink Opaque, is a brilliant stroke, standing in for 1990s shows like Xena: Warrior Princess that have been read by their audience as metaphors for same sex relationships. I Saw the TV Glow also displays the attraction and alienation wrought by watching the cathode ray tube. Smith's character suffers from such cognitive and technological dissonance that by film's end he is spewing technicolor static. Moments like these show Schoenbrun's promise.           

Golgotha

Robert Le Vigan and Harry Baur

Suffering through a surfeit of holiday cheer, as I hope you are dear reader, I felt the need to redress by taking a sizable stick to a Biblical picture and Julian Duvivier's Golgotha provided the opportunity. A 95 minute black and white epic from 1935, the pictures limits itself to the events of the Christian Holy Week. While there are some good individual sequences, particularly Christ routing the money lenders from the Temple, the picture is largely bland and workmanlike. Despite impressive sets, constructed in Algeria, and costumes, Golgotha is largely an eyesore. Duvivier, overworked and not particularly invested in the material, responds by relying on the pan. He scopes the massive sets from left to right and back again. Largely, this shows off the majesty of the film's plaster columns, but fails to add to the thrust of the narrative. An exception is a pan pivoting from Christ's flagellation to the mob baying for his blood. The script is a uneasy mix of Gospel, apocrypha, and supposition with endless scenes of the Sanhedrin conspiring or Mrs. Pilate expressing misgivings to her hubby.

Acting and characterization are secondary to the attempt at spectacle. Most of the performances seem hollow and stagey, even a miscast Jean Gabin as Pilate. The other bad guys fare better: Harry Baur and Lucas Gridoux are the standouts as Herod and Judas, respectively. Robert Le Vigan is a pinched Jesus, much like H.B. Warner in DeMille's far superior King of Kings. Le Vigan, best known in the US for his roles in Renoir films such as Madame Bovary and Les Bas-fonds, became a fervent Nazi collaborator and suffered the consequences after the war. He served three years of hard labor and died after a penurious exile in Argentina in 1972. Truly, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Film buffs nutty enough to seek this time waster out, should avoid the English dubbed print on Tubi. Golgotha failed to placate the English censors, but played America to some acclaim in 1937. Duvivier, Gabin, and Gridoux would reunite for the far superior Pépé le Moko.

                

Biff's Best Vintage Films Viewed in 2024

                               

 1)     Princess Yang Kwei-Fei                                     Kenji Mizoguchi                 1955

 2)     Summer Light                                                    Jean Grémillon                   1943

 3)     Chess of the Wind                                           Mohammed Reza Aslani      1976

 4)     How to Be Loved                                                 Wojciech Has                   1963

 5)     Dragnet Girl                                                        Yasujiro Ozu                      1933

 6)     Portrait of Madame Yuki                                   Kenji Mizoguchi                  1950

 7)     Victimas del Pecado                                           Emilio Fernández              1951

 8)     Two Girls on the Street                                         André De Toth                 1939

 9)     Desire                                                                      Sacha Guitry                  1937  

10)    César                                                                      Marcel Pagnol                1936

I also thoroughly enjoyed...

Une Femme Mariee, Samurai Wolf 2: Hell Cut, Red Psalm, 

GA-Ga: Glory to the Heroes, Burning Paradise, China Seas, Un Carnet de Bal, 

Black God, White Devil, The Hawks and the Sparrows, Tokyo Drifter,

The Baby Carriage, The Rite, The Bat Whispers, Desperate, 

The Halliday Brand, The Runner

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder

Tim Burton's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a well crafted and witty sequel that captures the anarchic impulses of the original. Burton's best work has always allied itself with the fringy weirdos and artsy outsiders of society and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice's script, by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, does a good job seizing upon this strain of his work. Winona Ryder is back and her character has grown up, fittingly, to become a podcaster on supernatural subjects. Catherine O'Hara also returns. Her character has become a performance artist which enable Burton to satirize the broad target that is the modern art world. New additions to the Beetlejuice world are mostly here as objects of parody. Willem Dafoe as an supernatural cop lampoons Hollywood vanity while Justin Theroux gives the film's best performance as a creepy boyfriend with new age trappings. Monica Bellucci, the latest in a long line of Burton's amours to figure in his work, is given little to do as Beetlejuice's vengeful ex-spouse.

Jeffrey Jones, who played Ryder's father in the original, has been mostly persona non grata in Hollywood since his conviction for child pornography. The script writers solved this conundrum by killing off his character. When Jones character does appear it is in a stop motion animation sequence or as a headless corpse. Michael Keaton once again perfectly embodies the raging id of the titular character. As in the original, a little of Keaton goes a long way. The team behind this production realize this and do a good job maximizing his limited appearances. Jenna Ortega, the star of Burton's Wednesday, appears as Ryder's daughter. The conflicts between mother and daughter here feel perfunctory, but I did enjoy Ortega's chemistry with romantic interest Arthur Conti. Presenting the awkward crush of  young love has been one of Burton's fortes.

Jenna Ortega

As an artist, Burton is hampered by a limited and somewhat juvenile worldview. His gentle satire of suburban conformity lacks the bite of someone like Vincent Minelli, Douglas Sirk or even John Waters. However, he is one of the preeminent Hollywood craftsman of his generation. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice looks great whether utilizing CGI, practical effects or miniatures. At 97 minutes in length, not counting the fifteen minutes or so of the endless technical end credits, this film is well paced and lacks the bloat of most Hollywood sequels. I appreciated the shout out to Mario Bava and, even more, the appropriation of Bava's style in a black and white sequence that sheds light on Beetlejuice's origin. I also dug Burton's tongue in cheek use of such cultural claptrap as Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park" which I have been unable to banish from my brain since 1967. The song seems to express the dilemma of any script writer tackling the assignment of a sequel: the fear that "...I'll never find that recipe again." All in all, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is Burton's best concoction since Dark Shadows. 
                  

A Canterbury Tale

Sheila Sims later Lady Attenborough

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, from 1944, is an uneven effort from the Archers with a number of wonderful moments. The film concerns three disperate travelers in England during the Second World War. The travelers, modern pilgrims, are on their way to Canterbury, but are stranded in the mythical village of Chillingbourne. One is an American GI played by John Sweet. There is also British soldier played by Denis Price and a urban English lass (Sheila Sims). All three receive a form of benediction when they reach Canterbury Cathedral.

However, the trio are ensnared in a half-assed mystery that is perversely perfunctory. A unknown miscreant has been tossing globs of glue in the hair of young ladies. Since the audience knows the perpetrator practically upon first glance, the mechanics of the trio's search for him is a flimsy edifice on which to rest the film. Luckily, the guilty party, a magistrate who is a member of the landed gentry, is played with suave relish by Eric Portman. The three leads were all making their debuts. Sweet is very awkward, When the war ended he returned to the States became a teacher. Sims, too, is very green, but has a winsomeness to her that suits the role. Price is the most accomplished of the trio and had a successful film career, most famously in Kind Hearts and Coronets. 

I dislike this film's use of juveniles and find its humor wanting, but the picture thrives in the open air of the Kent countryside. I don't give a toss about Chaucer, but when the Archers picture Ms. Sims hearing traces of the pilgrims of yore in a Kentish wind, I was moved. One of Powell's favorite pastimes was camping and hiking in the English countryside with his best friend, Alastair Dunnett, husband of the wonderful novelist Dorothy Dunnett. I was also weak kneed by the eloquence of Powell's camera when Sims searches Canterbury for a garaged caravan in which she enjoyed a halcyon summer with her presumed dead lover. She has trouble locating local landmarks because large swaths of the town had been destroyed in the Baedeker Blitz of 1942. The camera tracks past leveled buildings which had once housed tinkers, tailors, and vacuum machine salesman. A Canterbury Tale shows how the turmoil of World War 2 upended British society, opening up opportunities for women and helping build a less parochial nation. You can feel the winds of societal change that would sweep away the imperialism, misogyny, and selfishness of the landed gentry, personified in the film by Eric Portman and in real life by Winston Churchill. 

Le Parfum d'Yvonne

Jean-Pierre Marielle and Sandra Majani

Patrice Leconte's Le Parfume d'Yvonne, from 1994, is one of the more underrated of the French director's films. A box office bomb, it was Leconte's lowest grossing film of his eleven picture career at that time. Critical reaction was indifferent upon its release with many French critics comparing it unfavorably to its source novel, Patrick Modiano's Villa Triste. I haven't read the book, but am certainly willing to venture that Leconte thought it necessary to jettison much of the political background of the novel in order to make an hour and a half long film. The film's characters are ambiguous and that has led some to accuse the film of one dimensionality, but I feel this is due to Leconte foregrounding the eroticism and ambiguity in the film rather than championing reason and certainty.

The film primarily focuses on a doomed love affair between Victor Chmara (i.e. chimera), a would-be writer played by Hippolyte Giradot  and the mysterious Yvonne (Sandra Majani in her last role). The affair occurs during the summer of 1958 amidst the chichi settings of lakeside resorts that straddles the French-Swiss border. The events of this sun kissed summer are juxtaposed with Victor visiting the same area off season two years later, searching for signs of his lost love. The 1958 footage is bathed in light while the 1960 sequences, with La Dolce Vita playing at a theater, are mired in inky dark. In 1960, Victor seeks out Dr. Rene Meinthe who may have a clue to Yvonne's whereabouts. Meinthe is the most fascinating character in the film, enlivened by a fierce performance by Jean-Pierre Marielle. In '58, Meinthe mentored Yvonne, a local and "aspiring actress". When Victor becomes Yvonne's lover, they cohabit in Meinthe's swanky villa. Meinthe is queer and drifting into a lonely old age. He seems to be house doctor for the FLN, then in revolt against French rule in Algeria.

The struggle for Algerian independence lurks in the background of this romantic drama. Snippets of newsreels, radio reports, and loose talk allude to the struggle, but the sexual drama in luxe bourgeoise splendor predominates. Victor claims he is Russian, but shares memories of the Arab world with an Egyptian club owner. The troubled outside world is far away from the smart set bubble portrayed in Le Parfume.... Leconte's satiric jabs at the haut bourgeoisie reaches its apogee in a vintage auto show featuring tableaux avec chiens. Cinematographer Eduardo Serra's colors really pop here. The cocoon of the privileged and its attendant female beauties are filmed with a disconcerting glamor. The past cannot be regained in Le Parfum d'Yvonne, but it is alive in the present. It haunts Victor who is caught up in a erotic obsession.

The one dimensional nature of Victor and Yvonne is appropriate, they are both callow youths emotionally. Victor is a stand in for Patrick Modiano, the budding writer receiving a sentimental education. What Victor doesn't understand, despite repeated warnings, is that he and Yvonne are chalk and cheese, a farmer and a pirate. Yvonne lives for the day while the writer has his eye on eternity. Leconte gives Meinthe, the wisest and saddest of his main characters, a fittingly spectacular send-off, calling to mind Anna Galiena's adieu in The Hairdresser's Husband with its cinematic marshalling of the elements. Le Parfum d'Yvonne rivals Leconte's best work (The Hairdresser's Husband, Monsieur Hire, and Ridicule) in its sensuous reveries and unsentimental educations. There is even more to explore in a career that is still ongoing. Maybe one day I'll sample Leconte's biggest French hits: Les Bronzés 1, 2, and 3, also known as the French fried vacation trilogy.

Bio Zombie

Jordan Chan and Angela Tong

Wilson Yip's Bio Zombie is a comic splatter film from 1998, the missing link between George Romero and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead. Jordan Chan and and Sam Lee star as Woody Invincible and Crazy Bee, two overgrown adolescents who ostensibly work at a video store selling pirated discs in a Hong Kong shopping bazaar. We soon learn that the store is a front for an organized crime boss and that the duo are lower level minions of said boss. The two, who are similar to Beavis and Butthead or OC and Stiggs in their idiocy, spend their time engaging in petty theft or fruitlessly hitting on two comely beauticians who also work at the mall, Rolls (Angela Tong) and Jelly (Suk-Yin Lai). While fetching a vehicle for their boss, the duo accidently run down a gangster who possesses a magic zombie elixir or something. Our heroes try to revive the accident victim with the fateful elixir which turns him into a zombie. Soon the denizens of the mall are caught up in a virtual remake of Dawn of the Dead. 

Bio Zombie is the type of film best viewed without the help of one's cerebral cortex. Its gory silliness, heads roll as Joe Bob Briggs used to write, is akin to a Troma film, but the display of film craft is at a much higher level than most films of this ilk. The acting is also spiritedly silly. Kwok-Man Keung's vibrant color photography gives the film a pop fizz. Both Mr. Keung and Mr. Yip parlayed the success of this film into long careers in Chinese cinema with many credits to their name. The film has been released on disc in the US by Vinegar Syndrome and is another sterling restoration by the company.

State Funeral

Red Square, March 9th, 1953

Sergei Loznitsa's State Funeral is an assemblage of footage documenting the prolonged funeral ceremonies held throughout the Soviet Union to mark the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Loznitsa, a Ukrainian director of fictional films such as Donbass, has sifted through what must have been mountains of footage of the various events, all shot beautifully in both color and black and white. The memorials for Uncle Joe ranged throughout the USSR from Lviv to Vladivostok with many wreaths, commemorative buttons, armbands, banners, flags, and 21 gun salutes on display. The racial variety of the country is exhibited, as is the universal sorrow expressed for the fallen leader. Loznitsa weaves the footage into a seamless whole sequentially like a river that flows. No narration is provided, just the sonorous sorrow of radio commentators and rally speakers. The focus is not on Stalin's legacy or his corpse, but on the Soviet people who have been hypnotized by state media into worshipping their commander.

The repetitive nature of the film may prove daunting to some. Nevertheless, this is crucial to what the film seeks to portray: how the propaganda and pageantry of state socialism, akin to that of religious rituals, work to buttress the idolatry of their leadership. Speakers on state radio stress the immortality of Stalin as Chopin's funeral march plays over and over. Of course, it is the height of irony that a social movement founded on the rejection of religion used the narcotic buzz of its rituals and pageantry to keep the masses in line. Khrushchev presides over the funeral orations at Lenin's tomb like an MC. However, this is truly a dais of the damned. All of the main speakers (Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov) would be removed from power, and in Beria's case executed, within three years. State Funeral is currently streaming on MUBI. It is one of the more powerful documentaries released in the current century.

Lest we forget: Picasso's memorial tribute to Stalin

Andrey Sinyavsky was in his parents' apartment when he heard the news. Everyone broke down and started to howl, except for Sinyavsky and a friend whose eye he caught. They moved unobtrusively to another room, locked the door and danced in silent celebration.

Alex De Jonge, Stalin, pg. 481.

Saratoga

Clark Gable, Cliff Edwards, and Jean Harlow

Jack Conway's Saratoga, released in 1937, is a truncated and ghoulish romantic comedy set amidst the horsey set. It was Jean Harlow's final film. Harlow collapsed on set and died soon after of renal failure, the remnants of a childhood brush with scarlet fever. She was 26. MGM was left with an unfinished film. Rather than recast Harlow's part, Conway had to use a stand-in who he shot from the back or obscures with a ridiculously large hat. This certainly casts a pall on the proceedings during the final third of the picture. The studio was ultimately rewarded though, as Saratoga proved to be the top box office attraction of its year. The public's love of the young star was fervent and undiminished.   

I'm not convinced that Saratoga would have been a good film even if Harlow had survived. She plays Carol Clayton, a scion of a northern New York racing family who has been partying it up on the continent, winding up engaged to a rich Manhattan broker played by Walter Pidgeon. Carol has taken on hoity-toity air, which is anathema to the joyfully vulgar Harlow. The role is that of the spoiled heiress who needs to be taken down a peg. In other words, Katherine Hepburn or Claudette Colbert not Harlow. The stud taking her down is her usual MGM co-star Clark Gable playing a bookie named Duke Bradley, a role that fits his bonhomie like a moleskin glove. The only time the film takes off is when Gable, Cliff Edwards (who sang under the moniker of Ukulele Ike), Una Merkle, and Hattie McDaniel trade verses on "The Horse with the Dreamy Eyes" while on a train bound for the Florida race season. This musical scene takes advantage of Gable's everyman charm much like the  bus singing of "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" does in It Happened One Night.

Too much of Saratoga is set amongst rich swells, not the flea-bitten denizens of the horse racing world. Cedric Gibbons tony sets are nifty, but Conway uses them to little advantage. Pidgeon has a thankless part. Lionel Barrymore plays his typical codger to little effect. Similarly, Frank Morgan is wasted in the one joke role of a cold-cream tycoon allergic to horses. However, his consumption of spirits is convincing. Margaret Hamilton has a nice bitchy moment or two in an uncredited role. Overall, though, Saratoga is more unsettling than entertaining.

Jack Conway, Harlow and Gable

Angels Hard as They Come

Charles Dierkop

Joe Viola's Angels Hard as They Come is a dreadful biker flick, churned out for Roger Corman's New World Pictures in 1971. Despite the picture above, the flick is a color film shot at the disused Paramount Ranch. Scott Glenn stars as the stoic Long John who clashes with a rival biker gang after they assault and kill a hippie chick he is sweet on. Screenwriter Jonathan Demme pitched the script to Corman as a "biker Rashomon", but all the two films have in common is a rape. Viola, a lifelong friend and collaborator of Demme, seems to be learning as he directs and the result is slipshod, clumsy, and ugly. Demme's script is hardly better. A "good" print of this is hard to find. The print Tubi is running seems to be a dub of a VHS tape, though I doubt even a cleaned up print would look much more professional. Pictorially and aurally, this movie is no Easy Rider.

What interest the film has is the experience it provided for those seeking a toehold in the film industry. Glenn would go on to play the strong, silent type for another half a century. Gary Busey pops up as an apple cheeked, non-violent hippie. Charles Dierkop wins best in show by going full Manson for his role as "the General". Dierkop popped up in almost every 1970s cop show as a crooked lawman or hood. Jack Fisk did the art direction and Caleb Deschanel is credited with "Additional Photography". Angels Hard as They Come made Corman a pile of money, but only the more intrepid exploitation film historians need seek it out. 

Challengers

Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor

Luca Guadagnino's Challengers is a watchable love triangle set in the world of professional tennis. Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes gave Guadagnino a script attuned to the director's chief thematic concern: the mating rituals and attendant power moves of ambisexual youth. Rising stars Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor are more than fine as doubles partners turned romantic rivals, but it is Zendaya who is the true focal point of the film. For a young performer, she brings an impressive imperiousness to the role of a tennis queen bee. Ultimately, she pairs with the more compliant male drone rather than the exciting bad boy. Complications, of course, ensue. 

The picture is a slick soap opera with nary an important supporting character. The tennis scenes, amped by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' techno score, are ludicrously pumped up for the video game and Red Bull set, but give the flick a thumping energy. The film postulates tennis as a metaphor for sexual gamesmanship with attendant volleys and strokes. I found that there was precious little to chew once the film ended, Challengers is all surface, but the lead trio makes the film diverting, if not memorable.         

Blast of Silence

Allen Baron

Allen Baron's Blast of Silence, released in 1961, is an existential crime thriller made on a shoestring budget. Baron himself stars as a hit man from Cleveland back in his old stomping grounds of New York City for one last job. Baron and the then blacklisted Waldo Salt grafted on a second person narration to link the film's exterior sequences, which were shot silently, with its interior sequences. Lionel Stander, also on the blacklist, provides the suitably gravely narration. The film's cinematography by Merrill Brody looks particularly spiffy on the Criterion disc I saw, providing a glimpse of a Gotham long gone. We see Rockefeller Center, Greenwich Village, and lots of shop windows done up for yuletide. The veneer of Christmas cheer is an ironic contrast to our hardboiled protagonist who makes clear his disdain for the holiday. 

The interiors of Blast of Silence are a little less memorable than the exteriors. Certainly, the anti-romantic subplot concerning an old female acquaintance of the hit man falls flat. The film does contain a rare and treasured supporting turn by Larry Tucker. Tucker would memorably play Pagliacci in Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor before finding mainstream success as Paul Mazursky's writing partner. Peter Falk was scheduled to play Blast of Silence's protagonist before accepting a more lucrative offer, so Baron's faceless affect is understandable given the circumstances. Brody had been attached to an abortive Errol Flynn picture (Cuban Rebel Girls) and looted equipment from that project, helping to cut corners on an independent picture with a measly $20,000 budget. The influence of this terse film proved to be in inverse relation to its budget or box office. Certainly, Martin Scorsese took notes on how to use the mean streets of New York to frame stories about local hoods. A memorable sequence filmed at The Village Gate is part of the lineage of the many saloon scenes found in Scorsese's films.

Quick Takes, December 2024

Alec McCowen and Michael Redgrave in Time Without Pity

Joseph Losey's Time Without Pity, from 1957, is his first distinctive feature after a McCarthy induced exile in Europe. Michael Redgrave's drunken father lurches around London trying to exonerate his son played by Alec McCowen, before a scheduled execution. Hanging straps on the Tube portend doom, but the film is more than a brief against capital punishment. A gallery of frantic, cruel, and impotent males alternatively vie for dominance and beg for expiation. The baroque use of mirrors and windows illuminates Losey's barbed view of shattered families. The first rate cast features Leo McKern, Peter Cushing, Ann Todd, Joan Plowright, Renee Houston, and Lois Maxwell. Shot in coruscating black and white.

I enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan's Trap slightly more than I thought I could. Shorn of the pretentious baggage of most of his features, Trap is an efficient, if workmanlike thriller. Josh Hartnett is effective as a devious killer hiding beneath a goofy dad exterior. I enjoyed the supporting performance by Ariel Donoghue, Alison Pill, Jonathan Langdon, Kid Cudi and, be still my heart, Hayley Mills. The fly in the ointment is Saleka, Shyamalan's daughter, who is distractingly bad as a pop star. 

Justin Harding's Carved, currently streaming on Hulu has been critically received as a cinematic desecration, but I thought it was a goofily fun horror comedy. The film swipes its premise from Toxic Avenger, this time a toxic spill creates a killer pumpkin which terrorizes the denizens of a Maine township. The hurtling pumpkin cam harkens back to early Sam Raimi and the film succeeds in never taking itself too seriously. The young leads are mostly a wash, but veterans like DJ Qualls, Chris Elliott, and the ubiquitous Matty Cardarople are sterling in support.

Brian Netto and Adam Schindler's Don't Move, streaming on Netflix, is yet another run of the mill thriller. The directors show promise. They know and show how to construct a film mechanically, but the two leads fail to lift the material above the routine.

Denis Sanders' War Hunt, from 1962, is a well meaning, but clumsy Korean War film, shot for peanuts. John Saxon stars as a psycho infantryman who has gone over to the dark side while Robert Redford, making his film debut, is a raw recruit undergoing a loss of innocence. The acting is all over the place, but is much more interesting than the scenario or the direction. Sanders' documentary films tend to more distinctive than his patchy work in fictional features. A number of future Hollywood lifers dot the cast: including Sydney Pollack, Tom Skerritt, Charles Aidman, and Gavin MacLeod.

Christy Hall's Daddio is a formulaic two hander in which a cabbie (Sean Penn) and his fare (Dakota Johnson) hash out their problems during a long ride from JFK to midtown Manhattan. Johnson grows more assured with each performance and Penn is always an asset, but Hall's script is predictable and her direction dull.

Even duller is William Keighley's Each Dawn I Die, an anodyne crime melodrama from 1939 starring James Cagney and George Raft; their only pairing in a film in which both were billed above the title. Cagney plays a reporter who is framed by crooked politicos. Upon being sent up the river, Cagney befriends confirmed hood Raft who responds to Cagney's sense of fair play. The bland and irritating Jane Bryan is the token skirt. George Bancroft and Victor Jory are wasted in rote roles. The dialogue is inane and the plot nonsensical. Keighley's refined sincerity is anathema to the gritty textures of a Warners gangster film. Even the inevitable prison riot is lackluster. 

Battle Hymn

Rock Hudson

Douglas Sirk is most noted for the melodramas he directed for Universal producer Ross Hunter in the 1950s. However, he yearned for some variety and was particularly interested in filming aircraft, so Battle Hymn, also produced by Hunter, provides him a break from luxe interiors. The 1957 Cinemascope feature, shot in gorgeous Technicolor by frequent collaborator Russell Metty, is loosely based on a best selling memoir by Dean E. Hess. Hess was a Colonel in the Air Force who served in both World War 2 and the Korean conflict. While in Korea, he helped found an orphanage and saved the lives of many young refugees fleeing the war. Initially, Robert Mitchum was to play Hess, but Hess had doubts about Mitchum's character, so the role was given to Sirk and Hunter's standby leading man, Rock Hudson.

The eventual script for Battle Hymn, which has little to do with the actual events, is too pious, cliched, and hackneyed to build into a coherent and tolerable film. There are compensatory pleasures, though. Chief among them is Rock Hudson's performance. Hudson is sensitive enough to underplay his character's resolve and sanctimony. As we open the film, Hess is working as a minister in Ohio. However, he is haunted by his bombing of an orphanage in World War 2 which killed 37 children. He leaves ministry and wife (Martha Hyer in an extremely thankless role) behind as he departs for Korea. Hess is only supposed to instruct South Korean fighter pilots, but by film's end he has taken to the skies to wreak havoc. He finds the time to create an orphanage with an elderly sage and comely Anna Kashfi. Kashfi had the dubious fortune to marry Marlon Brando and only appeared in four films. Battle Hymn suggests she could have been a reliable screen presence. Certainly, she turns up the erotic heat in a film that badly needs it. 

The director stages this tendentious spectacle with equanimity. A belief in God's will is trumpeted as a bulwark against nihilism, but all religions and races are embraced in an egalitarian spirit. Sirk shoots characters in spiritual turmoil from the back, reinforcing a sense of something, trauma say, hidden and repressed. The film acknowledges American war atrocities well before My Lai and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Battle Hymn features Dan Duryea in a rare good guy role, plus Carl Benton Reid, James Edwards, Alan Hale Jr., and an uncredited James Hong.

Napoleon

Joaquin Phoenix

I waited for the inevitable director's cut of Ridley Scott's Napoleon before diving in and had a very mixed reaction. The subject requires a mini-series format of twelve hours at a minimum and this is why I waited to see the whole enchilada. History buffs, like me, would seem to be the best audience for this flick, though the film interjects many ahistorical moments, starting with Napoleon witnessing Marie Antoinette's execution. Scott certainly has proven he has the eye for historical epics and the lavishness of the production is eye-popping. The CGI segments of the battle sequences are less distracting than usual and in the case of the underwater shots of the Battle of Austerlitz, powerful.

However, the film is choppy. There are precious few memorable supporting characters. Fascinating figures like Barras, Fouché, Caulaincourt, Ney, Davous, and Dumas whiz by us as mere name checks. I could differentiate Talleyrand, but only because of the brace on his leg. Edouard Philipponnat as Tsar Alexander and Rupert Everett as Wellington stand out because David Scarpa's script paints them so broadly. Sinéad Cusack as Nappy's mother is given a few choice scenes which paint her as a stage mom, but she soon disappears into the ether. Napoleon's siblings, a motley crew of preening problemistas, are absent save for stolid Lucien.

Vanessa Kirby

Scarpa's script had to leave out a lot, so I'm not saying it was neccesarily a bad thing to leave out Napoleon's family background or his political and diplomatic stances. What we are left with is a film that primarily focuses on spectacle and Napoleon's relationship with wife number one, Josephine. As I've intimated, Scott handles the bloody tumult of battle well, though good luck to those seeking to glean Bonaparte's tactical brilliance. The coronation sequence, which mimics David's painting of the event, captures Napoleon's seizing his crown as a moment of grotesque self-actualization. The Pope was supposed to crown the impudent upstart, but, since this is not conveyed to the audience, this fine cinematic flourish is muffled, Similarly, the impact of the film's portrayal of Napoleon's execution of the Duke of Enghien lacks impact for the audience because the background information provided about the event is so scant.

The film does boast a fine Josephine in Vanessa Kirby in a role originally meant for Jodie Comer. Kirby captures both the sexual allure and steely resolve of a noblewoman who became a courtesan in order to survive. The film displays how Josephine was better suited to maneuver through the salons of Paris than Napoleon who was very much a Corsican bumpkin when he first emerged as a national figure. The film, if anything, is tilted in sympathy to Josephine. Napoleon is portrayed as a clumsy and abrupt lover who discards his wife when no heir is forthcoming, hardly a romantic ideal. I can certainly buy this point of view, but the film's presentation of Napoleon and Josephine's romance as the primary passion of their lives is hooey. Both partners had many lovers and if I would characterize their relationship as anything, it would be transactional.

The biggest problem in the film's portrayal of the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine is Joaquin Phoenix's age. Phoenix looks the same at the beginning of the film as he does at the end. He cannot be convincing as the callow social climber who depended on the older Josephine's social connections and knowhow. Phoenix is too good an actor not to give us some interesting moments, I especially enjoyed his encounter with a mummy during the Egyptian campaign, but he is too old and too neurotic in approach for the role. Phoenix gives us the immature husband besotted by his more experienced mate, but not the brilliant military tactician or the Machiavellian political leader. Napoleon has its moments, but it is a facsimile of a great film. 

Lumiére d'Eté

Madeleine Renaud and Pierre Brasseur

Jean Grémillon's Lumiére d'Eté (Summer Light), from 1943, is a gripping romantic melodrama and political allegory filmed in Vichy France during the Occupation. The main setting of the film is a remote hotel presided over by Cricri, a woman of a certain age played by Grémillon's frequent collaborator, Madeleine Renaud. Cricri has been set up in her position by her aristocratic lover Patrice (Pierre Brasseur), but Patrice seems bored by Cricri and is stringing her along till he finds a better prospect. Patrice is manipulative and has a fetish for firearms. We eventually learn that he killed his wife in a hunting "accident" in which Cricri was complicit. Into this perverse ménage arrives Michèle (Madeleine Robinson) who has traveled to the country from Paris to have a rendezvous with her artist boyfriend Roland (Pierre Brasseur). Roland does not prove to be heroic like his namesake of yore. An unrepentant drunk, he proves to be more interested in his own self-pity than in Michèle. Patrice invites Roland to stay at his chateau, ostensibly to decorate his walls, but really because he has designs on Michèle. Michèle also draws the attentions of Julien (Georges Marchal), a construction worker at a local dam project. All the characters converge at a masked ball at the chateau, a bravura sequence, which ends in tragedy.

The wartime allegory of Lumiére d'Eté is not hard to parse. The characters try to ignore the explosions that reverberate from the dam construction, much as Vichy France tried to ignore the distant guns of the ongoing conflict. Predation lurks in the background as an eagle menaces lambs. Intimations of sexual predation are also present with mentions of Leda and the swan and Susannah and the elders. Patrice is the arch fascist of the film and it is this portrait of a languid and cruel patrician that rankled authorities enough to suppress the film during the Occupation. The indolence of the Vichy supporting upper class is contrasted with the labor of the working class toiling at the dam site. The drama climaxes with communal action thwarting a singular evil. Michèle and her hunky proletarian lover hike out towards the hinterlands at film's end, presumably to join the Resistance. 

Madeleine Robinson

The script of Lumiére d'Eté, by Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche, especially its depiction of sexual and class conflicts. has drawn many comparisons to The Rules of the Game; with justification. Lumiére d'Eté is not in the same league as Renoir's film for reasons besides originality, but precious few films are. Patrice's shooting gallery is a little too similar to Marcel Dalio's mechanical birds, at least metaphorically. I also feel that Grémillon fails to flesh out his supporting characters in stock roles as well as Renoir does. Both Raymond Aimos (Ernest) and Léonce Corne (Tonton) are fine supporting actors, but they can't elevate their characters above a one dimensional level. Grémillon's film does have one attribute that surpasses The Rules of the Game, its exterior scenes. The roughhewn construction site is a vital counterpoint to the refined excesses of Patrice's chateau and Cricri's hotel, ironically monikered The Guardian Angel. 

The three males leads of the film are fine, though Pierre Brasseur is prone to burlesque in his many drunk scenes, but this film belongs to its leading ladies. Madeleine Robinson's Michèle is fertile innocence juxtaposed with the barren experience of Madeleine Renaud's Cricri. Michèle has an array of suitors while Cricri is bereft. Both performances are beautiful and touching. Robinson is given one of the most radiant entrances (see above) in cinema as she walks up towards The Guardian Angel surrounded by a gorgeous vista. A creature of nature in its realm, to which she returns at film's end. Cricri, like the pets in the film (birds and crickets), is a creature in a cage entirely dependent on the largesse of her owner. Happily, Renaud would receive a much less masochistic role in her next role for Grémillon, the aviatrix in Le ciel est à vous. All in all, Lumiére d'Eté is a first rate picture, worthy of more exposure.

Palm Springs

Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg

Max Barbakow's Palm Springs, from 2020, is a time loop comedy that boasts both hilarity and depth. A perverse riff on Groundhog Day, Palm Springs has Andy Samberg reliving the same desert resort wedding day in perpetuity. He seizes the opportunity to drink excessively and seduce who he can within the wedding party. Unlike Groundhog Day, Samberg is joined in the loop by a nemesis (J.K. Simmons) and a romantic interest (Cristin Milioti). Andy Siara's witty script uses an outlandish premise, as in classic screwball comedies, to poke fun at American mores. Despite a major flaw, Palm Springs is one of the better American comedies of this century.

Unfortunately, that flaw is Mr. Samberg. I feel bad for kicking a man when he is down. After the results of the recent election, it looks like he will lose his gig on Saturday Night Live playing Doug Emhoff. Palm Springs shows that the parodies and skits of SNL and The Lonely Island are a better home for his talents than playing a romantic lead, even in a goofy comedy. Bill Murray's performance in Groundhog Day lets the audience in on the joke. He allows them to see he is playing a naughty brat who must be reformed before experiencing mature love. All we get from Samberg, whether he is clutching a beer or Ms. Milioti, is a smug smirk. Whenever charm and grace are needed, as when Samberg maneuvers through the reception throng to catch Ms. Milioti's eye, Samberg falls woefully short. Since this film is Samberg's and Siara's baby, nurtured since their AFI days, I feel doubly bad about pointing out the obvious. 

Ms. Milioti, however, is superb in a modern take on a screwball heroine that makes us laugh and empathize with her character's plight. Her character is more morally ambivalent than the screwball heroines of past, but Ms. Milioti, as she has shown on The Penguin, is adept at bringing steel and ice to a character. Hulu has kept a tight wrap around Palm Springs since its truncated theatrical run, there seems to be no DVD or Blu-ray release in the US, but it seems that Hollywood is catching onto Ms. Milioti's varied talents. 

One of the possible reasons for the lack of a disc release for Palm Springs, its music licensing, is a strength of the film. The song selections, which range from Hawaiian tunes to Patrick Cowley, comments on the action in a more interesting fashion than in most pop films of this ilk. Some of the tunes reinforce a mood, Gram Parsons' In My Hour of Darkness plays at the bar when Samberg, at his lowest ebb, drowns his sorrows. John Cale's Barracuda, ostensibly upbeat, plays up the sexual and social one-upmanship surrounding the film's wedding and reception. Most interesting of all is the use of Gene Clark's No Other while Samberg reminisces about how he and J.K. Simmons once went on a bender, snorting up half of Bolivia. The song and attendant album are permeated by cocaine's highs and lows. The song's lyrics, like Palm Springs, grapple with the push and pull of sexual fidelity.

Simmons is always a valuable asset to a film, but Palm Springs brings together a host of scene stealers: including Meredith Hagner, Tyler Hoechlin, June Squibb, and Peter Gallagher. Barbakow keeps things at an antic pace without getting out of control. I think the film was poorly marketed, Palm Desert or Joshua Tree have been better titles for the film. Palm Springs as a title smacks more of Sinatra than the aliens and magic mushrooms that figure in the film itself. Nevertheless, this is a picture that will only gain in esteem in the future.

Easy to Love

Mary Astor, Genevieve Tobin and Adolphe Menjou 

William Keighley's Easy to Love, released in early 1934, is a slim but enjoyable bedroom comedy made for Warner Brothers. Derived from Thompson Buchanan's mildly successful play As Good as New, Easy to Love is boiled down to essentials, running just over an hour. There is no attempt to open up the play, even a shot of Adolphe Menjou gazing at the moon is filmed on a soundstage. Keighley, who was just one of many talents brought west from Broadway after the advent of the talkies, is a pretty good match for the material in what was his first film as sole director. He does not have the sauciness or the visual invention of a Lubitsch, but he has the timing and rapport with actors of an old pro. Easy to Love is the umpteenth iteration of the continental boudoir farce. Thank the Lord it was made Pre-Code. Keighley's refinement meshes better with the material than some later films he was assigned by Warner Brothers like Each Dawn I Die

Lobby card for the black and white Easy to Love

The film stars Genevieve Tobin, usually a supporting player in this era, as a rich wife with a straying husband. Hubby is played by Menjou who fits the role perfectly. He is dallying with his wife's best friend (Mary Astor) who is stringing along Edward Everett Horton. In turn, Horton is besotted with Tobin. Of course, after Tobin pretends to be making time with Horton, she provokes Menjou' jealousy which leads to the inevitable conclusion that upholds wedded bliss and the double standard. The ensemble playing of the romantic quartet

is exemplary and there are nice supporting turns by Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert. Orry-Kelly's outfits are a plus. I don't like Ms. Tobin's outfit in the top photo, but swooned over Ms. Astor in a halter top. I did not care for the subplot of Tobin's daughter and her beau, but Easy to Love is enjoyable fluff that is easy to like. Easy to Love and One Hour With You are the best showcases for Ms. Tobin's talents. She married Keighley in 1938 and, soon after quit show biz. 

Revenge

Matilda Lutz

Coralie Fargeat's Revenge, her first feature film from 2017, is a gory and effective action thriller. Matilda Lutz portrays Jen, a mistress of a wealthy French man, who has a rendezvous with her lover at an isolated estate in a Moroccan game reserve. Jen's lover is meeting up with two buddies to go hunting, but things do not go as planned. Jen is raped and abused by the three men and, after a fall from a cliff, is left for dead. However, she is very much alive and bent on, yes, revenge. The film eschews plausibility and the characterizations verge on the one dimensional, but Revenge is a tautly constructed film with palpable energy. Fargeat's technical gifts are very much in evidence. Her framing of the action is always interesting and her use of sound, whether it is Mozart, techno or silence, effective.

Fans of Fargeat's second feature, The Substance, will find that her debut has much in common with her sophomore feature. Guillaume Bouchède gulping down of a candy bar as he watches Jen being raped is of a piece with Dennis Quaid's loud mastication of prawns in The Substance. Both films portray men as greedy animals focused wholly on their personal consumption. Predators circling each other's trail. Body horror is a major element in her two features. All four characters in Revenge endure excruciating physical ordeals and Fargeat's camera never flinches. Those looking for nuance and humanist uplift should pass Revenge by, but hardened action fans will enjoy the ferocious carnage. Each of her feature films display Fargeat's talent and craftmanship. It remains to be seen whether her reductive view of humanity will gain depth in time. 

Wrong Move

Rüdiger Vogler and Hanna Schygulla

Wim Wenders' Wrong Move, from 1975, was the second of three road movies Wenders made during the 70s starring Rüdiger Vogler. It was Wenders first color feature and part of his longtime collaboration with the writer Peter Handke. Handke based the film on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, a seminal bildungsroman, but Handke just uses Goethe's premise as a springboard for a young man's journey from through West Germany. The film opens with aerial shot of Mr. Meister's home town of Boppard. Various modes of conveyance are used in the picture by the characters and serve as motifs for the director: trains, subways, ferries, bikes, autos. The film's most typical shot is a dolly of two characters walking and talking, through squares, streets, hill, and dale. The late great Robby Müller's plein air cinematography gives the characters room to breathe and spout philosophical reveries. It has an unfussy elegance to it that helps put over the empathy with which Wenders regards his characters.

We first encounter Wenders' Wilhelm Meister regarding the town square of Boppard from his window. He is dressed in bourgeoise fashion and lolls about his room listening to the Troggs in a mood of sullen despair. He breaks his windows and his complacency in an angry fit and draws blood, in the film's first too obvious instance of the use of blood as a symbol of German collective guilt. Mama has had enough and though she says she loves Wilhelm's "unrest and discontent" (Thanks Mom!), she says he must leave home in order to gain the experience he needs to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. Wilhelm bids a curt and unromantic adieu to his girlfriend. Significantly, she, like the other two women who become enamored with the diffident Wilhelm through the course of the film, is in a guise and not playing her "real" self. Wenders gives the great Lisa Kreuzer a magnificent entrance, doffing her wig and exposing her true self to her feckless lover before Wilhelm departs on his peripatetic journey. Then she is lost to us and Wilhelm.

Wenders throws at his audience, a la Godard, a host of cultural nods during the course of his hero's sentimental education: Flaubert, Faulkner, The Kinks, Bob Dylan, Straub-Huillet, Schiller, Beethoven, Eichendorff. However, these allusions are discarded as, over the course of the film, Wilhelm travels with a band of misfits who are attracted to his unassuming charisma. They all have their stories and their dreams, which they recount, but it is their unvarnished humanity which ultimately shakes Wilhelm out of his solipsism, a little. In this, Wenders is greatly helped by his most professionally lauded and accomplished cast thus far. Vogler was already an axiom of Wenders' cinema and, expectedly, fits snugly. Hanna Schygulla, taking a break from the S and M fables of Fassbinder, is at her most beautiful and touching. Though I admit there is more than a bit of masochism in her character, an actress who falls for the remote Wilhelm. Hans Christian Blech, Peter Kern, and Ivan Desny all offer memorable vignettes as varyingly toxic examples of German masculinity. All of the actors help make Handke's high falutin rhetoric remain anchored instead of floating off into the clouds.

Vogler and Nastassja Kinski

Nastassja Kinski, making her film debut, is another kettle of fish entirely. Kinski plays a Lolitaesque mute, part of a transient grifting duo. She thinks Wilhelm is the cat's pajamas and nuzzles up to him whenever she can. Kinski has an abortive nude romantic scene with Vogler (she was twelve or so) and while some may tut-tut, I found Wenders ambivalence towards adolescent sexuality refreshing and not exploitive. Certainly, Kinski's lack of dialogue helps makes this one of her most convincing performances.

All in all, the cockeyed dourness of Wrong Moves makes me see why it is the most obscure of Wenders' road trilogy. The coming to account of a character with his Nazi past struck me more as a sign of artistic pretension than insight, but, on the whole, the people we meet in Wrong Move, are interesting and evocative. It is the tender regard that Wenders treats even his blackest characters that redeems the sometimes feckless journey of this film. 

Rapito

Paolo Pierobon as Pope Pius IX

Marco Bellocchio's Rapito (Kidnapped) is, by my count, the Italian director's 37th feature film since he debuted with the terrific Fists in the Pocket in 1965. Subtitled The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara, Rapito tells the true life story of a six year old Jewish boy in Bologna who was snatched by Papal authorities in 1851, taken to Rome, converted to Catholicism and eventually became a priest. This caused an international furor chronicled in Daniele Scalise's The Mortara Case, the basis of the film's script and a book not yet available in English. The film juxtaposes the rites and rituals of both religions shifting between Edgardo's Catholic education and his beside themselves parents and their household in Bologna.

Rapito's story is so wrenching that the film needs little directorial embellishment. Despite a few critics accusing the director of melodramatic overstatement, I think Bellocchio shows great restraint, often filming the proceedings at a classical remove. Close-ups are largely reserved for Edgardo, Edgardo's distraught parents or the film's main villains. Bellocchio is fully on the side of the Mortara family, but his portrait of the clergy has some balance with a few notable exceptions. These include Father Feletti, a zealous Inquisition official who is the architect of Edgardo's forced conversion, and Pope Pius IX. The arc of the film focuses as much on Pius as it does on Edgardo who, when he reaches maturity, is rapt in his adoration of his pontiff. Edgardo's brain washing is conveyed by Bellocchio through the repetitive and rote nature of his Catholic education. Bellocchio presents his protagonist's religious instruction as an indoctrination by a cult.

Paolo Pierobon has the film's juiciest role as the vain and power mad Pius, drunk with his own papal infallibility, and delivers an indelible portrait of evil. Pius and his Papal states are literally under siege by a burgeoning nationalist movement that would unite the nation into a secular republic under Victor Emmanuel II. Pius' anxiety is illustrated in a few dream or hallucinatory sequences which include his being circumcised by a cabal of Hebrew elders. These moments go a long way in keeping Rapito from being a dry historical treatise. These sequences parallel a number of hallucinatory dream sequences that convey how Edgardo's unconscious is affected by the dogma and graven images of the church. A further parallel is the image of Eduardo hiding under a skirt. Initially he hides under his mother's skirt when threatened with being separated from his family. Eventually he nestles under the pope's robes during a game of hide and seek, marking his shift in allegiance to mother church.

Barbara Ronchi

Edgardo becomes such a devout defender of his newfound faith that he tries to baptize his mother on her deathbed. It is a tribute to Barbara Ronchi's performance as the mother that this climactic moment never seems overheated or hackneyed. Technically, Rapito is immaculate. I particularly enjoyed Francesco Di Giacomo's cinematography and Fabio Massimo Capo Grosso's score. The lion's share of the credit should go to Bellocchio, a filmmaker whose releases in America has been limited. Rapito is an impressively vigorous film from an 84 year old artist. The best of his work that I've seen ( which would include besides Rapito and Fists in the Pocket, Vincere and Devil in the Flesh) indicates that he needs more exposure on these shores.