How to Be Loved

Barbara Krafftowna and Zbigniew Cybulski

Wojciech Has' How to Be Loved, from 1963 , focuses on a woman's reminisces of an ill-fated wartime romance.  Felicja (Barbara Krafftowna) is a successful radio play actress traveling to Paris by air for the first time in 1962. She is anxious about flying, smoking many cigarettes (those were the days) and downing many cognacs. She makes small talk with a Polish emigre, but he is too stiff for her. She thinks back to meeting her great love, Wiktor (Zbigniew Cybulski) on the eve of the Second World War. Wiktor was a star, playing Hamlet to neophyte Felicja's Ophelia. We watch her rehearse for a production that never occurs, interrupted by the invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia. During the occupation, Wiktor is implicated in a killing and a price is put on his head by the Gestapo. Felicja shelters him in a small flat in Krakow for the duration and Wiktor succumbs to her charms, somewhat.

Wiktor comes to resent his confinement and, eventually, Felicja. When the Soviet liberation occurs, he splits as soon as possible with nary a kind word for Felicja. She suffers the indignity of being punished for collaboration, bounces back, but still pines for her Byronic lover. They are reunited, but Wiktor is irredeemable. All of this is intercut with shots of the latter day Felicja onboard the plane. No matter where she is in the course of the fractured narrative, Felicja is beset upon by men with one thing in mind. The more sophisticated suitors, like the emigre on the plane or Tomasz, her manager at a cafe where she has a steady gig, are better able to mask their designs, but they all have the same goal in mind. They are duplicitous swine, to varying degrees, who want to get into Felicja's knickers. War unmasks the rapacious savagery in men which we witness when Felicja is gang raped in her flat.

During this violation, Wiktor cowers in his closet. He is a self-centered child, not worthy of the love the masochistic Felicja offers him. He literally does not play well with others and this dooms his acting career. Even when he plays chess, it is only with himself. The role of Wiktor is a perfect fit for the closest approximation of James Dean Poland ever produced. Cybulski portrays Wiktor as if he is the resistance fighter of Ashes and Diamonds gone to seed after innumerable slugs of vodka and self-pity. His performance is a bit stagey, but this is true to a character with a flair for the self-dramatic. Krafftowna is every bit as effective, but she is playing a character who wallows in masochistic love behind a calm facade. Her performance is more about concealing than revealing. Has and writer Kazmierz Brandy, who wrote the original novel on which the screenplay was based. have crafted a film which shifts point of view, never fully sharing Felicja's suffering. Notice how, in the plane sequences, Has shoots from the POV of the emigre whenever he gazes at a comely stewardess. We are seeing life both from the point of view of the wolves and the lambs.

How to Be Loved is a very good film, but I find its stagey claustrophobia to be emotionally constricted. I also feel the same way about the filmic chamber dramas Ingmar Bergman was crafting at this time. Indeed, Bergman's The Silence would make a well matched and insufferable wartime confinement double feature with How to Be Loved. In both films, the theme of hell being other people wears a little too heavily. Ultimately, the theater was so central to Bergman that a number of his best films (Smiles of a Summer Night, The Magician, After the Rehearsal) could easily have been made for the stage. Has needed to lose his shit and venture into surrealism and the unconscious before delivering a masterpiece with his next film, The Saragossa Manuscript. This film, also featuring Cybulski, is one of the great films of the 1960s. Yellow Veil Pictures has released three of Has' fourteen features on disc in the USA: How to Be Loved, The Saragossa Manuscript, and, from 1973, the even more out there, The Hour-Glass Sanitarium. I commend them to all.

La Nuit Du 12

Bastien Bouillon and Bouli Lanners

Dominik Moll's La Nuit Du 12 (The Night of the 12th) is a superior slow burn police procedural. Prefaced by a title that says it was based on an actual unsolved case, the film centers on an investigation into the murder of a young woman who was horrifically burned to death. Moll and Gilles Marchand's script focuses as much on the toll police work takes on the investigators as on the investigation itself. As the police interview the various suspects, mostly skeevy ex-boyfriends of the young woman, they deal with the disgust and nausea inspired by consorting with amoral and immoral young men. The repetitive nature of the investigators life, one of them invokes the metaphor of a hamster wheel, takes its toll.

The newly promoted Captain of the force, Yohan, played by Bastien Bouillon, seems the most impervious to that toll. He blows off steam by endlessly circling his bike around a velodrome. He has the discipline to deal with the repetitive stresses of police life, but it comes with a cost. The Captain seems to have no personal life. Marceau, an older officer played by Bouli Lanners, is coming to the end of his tether. His marriage is breaking up and Marceau responds by becoming violent when confronting suspects. His days on the force are numbered and he knows it.

Mr. Moll has been making unflashy, hard-boiled flicks since his impressive debut, Harry, He's Here to Help. His work is well respected in France, La Nuit Du 12 won Best Picture at the Cesar awards, but has made little impact elsewhere; perhaps because his films don't call attention to themselves stylistically and have a misanthropic streak. La Nuit Du 12 is impressively crafted and acted, particularly by Mr. Lanners, but is possibly too cold-eyed for popular appeal. Nevertheless, Moll allows glimmers of humanity to pierce through the cold rational frames of his films. La Nuit Du 12 offers no triumph of justice, but offers up enough intimations of personal growth to help ameliorate its dour worldview.

Lady of Burlesque

Iris Adrian and Barbara Stanwyck in Lady of Burlesque

William Wellman's Lady of Burlesque is an occasionally winning musical comedy mystery that has musical bright spots, passable comedy, and uninteresting mystery elements. The film is a cleaned up adaptation of Gypsy Rose Lee's mystery novel, The G-String Murders which was successful enough to inspire a follow-up, Mother Finds a Body. The film occurs almost entirely backstage at a burlesque house where the girls show all that was acceptable under the Production Code. The production numbers are fun, especially Stanwyck warbling "Take It Off the E String, Play It On the G String" and James Gunn's screenplay captures the book's snappy dialogue.

What neither Gunn nor Wellman can transcend is the book's half-assed murder mystery. Every time a body is found, the police gather the many suspects in a dressing room, laboriously questioning them, and the film comes to a grinding halt. Since this was a two week quickie for RKO, I doubt Wellman had any compunction to jazz up the proceedings. He does have a feel for the rat a tat tat backstage patter and provides Ms. Stanwyck a nifty entrance. RKO must have been banking on the leggy appeal of Ms. Stanwyck to repeat the success of 1941's Ball of Fire whose Sugarpuss O'Shea is a twin of Lady of Burlesque's Dixie Daisy. The cheesecake of the film's chorines and Ms. Stanwyck's moxie did indeed insure a windfall for RKO.

The G-String Murders has autobiographical elements that jibed with Ms. Stanwyck's own career. Ms. Lee drew upon her reminisces of a former lover to conjure Dixie's romantic interest, Biff Brannigan. Stanwyck had got her start in the speakeasies and vaudeville theaters of New York, at 16. Her first marriage was to vaudeville comedian Frank Fay. So, Stanwyck didn't have to act, just be. Since she was the Hollywood actress of her era, her performance is a marvel of remembered technique and rueful nostalgia. She is the cynosure of the film and reason enough to see it. The comic in Lady of Burlesque is played by Michael O' Shea who also started as a vaudevillian and was coming off a stage success in The Eve of St. Mark. O'Shea is very good in the vaudeville skits, but somehow lacked cinematic sparkle dust. He had a fitful Hollywood career, but did marry Virginia Mayo.

Lady of Burlesque is not quite a good film, but has its moments. I find it more spritely than Wellman's prestige film of 1943, The Ox Bow Incident, one of the moldier of Hollywood's old chestnuts. Someone could make a good film or mini-series out of the real story of Gypsy Rose Lee and, no, the musical or film of Gypsy doesn't count.

Stanwyck at age 24

Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls

Abaddon the Demon in Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls

Andrew Bowser stars in, wrote, and directed Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, an engaging comic horror film. Bowser strived over a decade to get this project off the ground and was able to crowdfund enough financing to achieve his dream. Bowser's influences (80s comic horror flicks like Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice) are a bit too goofy for my taste, but Bowser's film is fast-paced and buoyant with mirth. The cast achieves a nice balance between comic book hysteria and faux seriousness amidst much mumbo jumbo. The one exception is Bowser's own performance which is laden with tics. Still, anyone savvy enough to cast Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton (stars of the immortal Reanimator) can be forgiven his self-indulgences.

Onyx...is ridiculously lightweight and overly concerned with pre-teen sexual anxiety; especially considering that there are no pre-teens in the film. There are collectibles which should clue one in to the arrested development feel to the flick. What redeems the film's dopey premise is the craft behind the flick. The set decoration, make-up, costumes, and monsters all display the handmade effort and love that was lavished on them. The puppetry used to animate the monsters (see above) adds to the film's tactility and sense of deja vu. Onyx... is a tribute to a more hands-on era before the rise of CGI.
 

Show People

Marion Davies

King Vidor's Show People, from 1928, is a winning and affectionate satire of Hollywood, The story was probably old hat even at the time, but provides a good setting for Marion Davies' comic talents. Ms. Davies plays Peggy Pepper, a green wannabe from Georgia who wants to break into movies. Show People opens with Peggy and her Pa driving down Hollywood Boulevard dressed as if they had escaped from a roadshow production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Peggy meets established comic Billy Boone (William Haines) who helps her get a break with his troupe. Peggy is an instant hit and parlays her success by taking on more serious roles under her new stage name, Patricia Pepoire. Success goes to Ms. Pepoire's head, but, don't worry folks, true love wins out in the end.

Ms. Davies' career declined swiftly during the sound era, but performances like this one show why critics years later rehabilitated her reputation as a crackerjack comedian. She certainly could not be accused of taking herself too seriously. That was William Randolph Hearst's assumed duty. Mr. Vidor is also not taking himself very seriously. Vidor gets to poke fun at his own films, The Big Parade and Bardelys the Magnificent, which Billy Boone terms "a punk drama". Show People closely resembles the career of Gloria Swanson who started out working for Mack Sennett. Vidor has great fun mimicking Sennett's manic shorts. A spray bottle is repeatedly utilized as are various pastry. What impressed me the most was Vidor's indulgence of his bit players. Half of Hollywood cameos in the film, but Vidor wrings funny moments from such unheralded players as Polly Moran, Kalla Pasha, and Rolfe Sedan. Light as a feather, Show People is available to stream in a tolerable print on Tubi.

Samurai Wolf 2: Hell Cut

Isao Natsuyagi is the Samurai Wolf

Hideo Gosha's Samurai Wolf 2: Hell Cut is the second and best of the two Samurai Wolf features. This 1967 film is the more evocative and intricately structured of the two, though both share many similarities. They run barely over 70 minutes, are in black and white, and are decidedly B budget films in terms of production. Isao Natsuyagi's playing of "Kiba the furious wolf" was only his second film role, an indication that Gosha was watching his pennies when he made the initial Samurai Wolf. Gosha had started in radio, which explains his proficiency using sound effects, and had been directing television shows. Samurai films were an opportunity to make a surefire hit and the 1966 Samurai Wolf delivered, necessitating the sequel.

Most sequels are rote and dull facsimiles of the original. However, some sequels offer filmmakers the opportunity to expand their vision with a bigger budget and inspired variation. That is why I prefer Spider Man 2 over Spider-Man, The Evil Dead 2 over The Evil Dead, The Godfather 2 to The Godfather, For a Few Dollars More to A Fistful of Dollars, and Sanjuro over Yojumbo. The latter two sequels stem from the work of Gosha's acknowledged influences, Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa. In the Samurai Wolf , Isao Natsuyagi borrows a good deal of Toshiro Mifune's feral intensity from his appearances in Kurosawa's films. ...Hell Cut even has the same mountainous locations featured in Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress to equally striking effect. Toshiaki Tsushima's scores for both Wolf film tips its sombrero to Morricone's scores for Leone, featuring lengthy plaintiff harmonica solos as horseman ride. 

...Hell Cut opens up Kiba's personality allowing him a tentative friendship and romance. In the first film, Kiba is such a lone wolf that he even spurns the romantic overtures of an elegant blind lady. In Hell Cut, the literal bond formed with his loved one saves his life. Kiba is contrasted with the more mercenary and merciless ronin, Magobe. Fortitude is contrasted with moral weakness, honesty with deceit. Magobe has helped operate an illegal gold mine which is poisoning the waters of local streams, a prescient environmental note. As in Leone, greed warps and corrupts men. Gosha uses more bravura techniques in the sequel than in the original, always to signal a mood or heighten a theme, A track into an obdurate dojo master quickens our anticipation of a duel. Freeze frames express the silence and finality of death.

The multiple flashbacks of Kiba's childhood with his doomed ronin dad fleshes out his saga. The short duration of ...Hell Cat contains a wealth of compressed details and emotional development. There is not a fold of fabric or hair pin out of place. Both Rumiko Fuji and Kiba's handy shears are welcome returns from the first film. The sinister presence of crows points the way to Gosha's later color samurai masterpiece, Goyokin (1969). Another film about greed, specifically, "The Gold of the Shogunate". The poetic touches of Samurai Wolf 2: Hell Cut are sometimes self-conscious, but they liberate Gosha enough for some exultant genre filmmaking.

Quick Takes, April 2024

Tell Me A Creepy Story

Almost universally derided, I found the horror anthology Tell Me A Creepy Story to be a more vigorous exploration of the horror genre than recent films by more established directors like David Gordon Green (The Exorcist: Believer), Eli Roth (Thanksgiving), and Sofia Coppola (Priscilla aka Dead Elvis). The short films by Samuel Dawe and Felix Dobaire are especially promising. 

Don Roos has morphed into a screenwriter for hire these days, but his 2005 effort Happy Endings made me wish he would return to directing films one day. Happy Endings was a box office dud, I don't think any of Roos' films were hits, and was given mixed reviews by the critics, one scribe described it as "Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia for adolescents." I would describe it an Altmanesque (one of Anderson's heroes) in its use of interconnecting stories, a large ensemble, and a 20th century LA setting. Roos has his own obsessions though, best displayed here and in The Opposite of Sex: chiefly affluence in America, sexual ambiguity and deceit. The plot's hinging on abortion and immigration give it added resonance today. Roos use of hand held cameras, limited to the more volatile scenes, is a model of restraint. Lisa Kudrow, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tom Arnold, Steve Coogan, Bobby Cannavale, and Laura Dern all have their moments.

Nicholas Ray's Hot Blood is a outlandish Gypsy quasi-musical, from 1956, starring Jane Russell and Cornel Wilde. Russell tricks future Gypsy King Wilde into marriage and for the rest of the flick they circle each other like polecats, brandishing whips and knives. The film shares the same set bound saloon milieu as Ray's other quasi-musical, Party Girl. Ray being Ray, there are more than a few tilted shots and interesting inserts. The view of Romani culture is pure Hollywood balderdash and the ethnic humor is excruciating, but Ray channels Russell and Wilde's physicality well. The picture is well paced and vivid, almost comically so. The film is a Cinemascope and Technicolor eye popper which Tubi is currently streaming in its proper ratio. Not great art or even a good Nicholas Ray film, Hot Blood does have its entertaining and bizarre moments. Featuring Luther Adler, Joseph, Calleia, and Richard Deacon.

Frank Borzage's Strange Cargo, from 1940, is an MGM romantic adventure drama that reteamed Joan Crawford and Clark Gable for the final time. The Christian mystical aspects of the film, with Ian Hunter playing a Jesus figure, jibes with Borzage's tremulous Romanticism, but the action scenes are routine and, like a good deal of MGM productions, the picture feels overstuffed. Crawford plays a "dance hall girl" in French Guiana who somewhat improbably escapes with Gable and five other dangerous inmates. There are the usual jungle perils: quicksand, crocodiles, sharks. and Peter Lorre playing an informer and procurer. There are also unusual elements. Gable debates theology with Hunter! Crawford is shown without full makeup for a quarter of the film! The plot is seamy, there are intimations of prostitution, homosexuality, and rape, and it drew a Condemned rating from the Catholic League of Decency which also criticized the film's "naturalistic concept of religion". Not coherent enough to be a good film, the film boasts sterling performances. Crawford and Gable are relaxed and fun as they duel each other with knives, kisses, and brickbats. Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, J. Edward Bromberg, Eduardo Ciannelli, and John Arledge make up a memorable rogue's galley. 

Ira Sachs' Passages is an insipid love triangle. Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adele Exarchopoulos, all competent performers, are not given believable characters to inhabit. The impassive results fail to even rise to a soap opera level.

Burt Kennedy's Young Billy Young is an extremely feeble Western from 1969. A rehash of innumerable cliches, not even the presence of Robert Mitchum, Angie Dickinson, Robert Walker Jr., David Carradine, and Jack Kelly can enliven this dud.

Paul Anderson's Mortal Kombat, from 1995, is risible drivel.

Civil War

Cailee Spaeny and Kirsten Dunst

Alex Garland's Civil War is the most disappointing release of 2024 thus far. I have enjoyed Mr. Garland's films and novels to varying degrees, but Civil War is a high concept film that is all concept and not much else. Some critics have praised Garland for his restraint in not making the film an overly obvious anti-MAGA screed. I thought it was indicative of the film's vacuity. There are no subtexts in the film only a text: the journey of four journalists from NYC to DC amidst wartime carnage to bear witness to President Nick Offerman getting offed. The universe Civil War presents is not believable (California allied with Texas?) and is hermetically sealed. The world outside the US is not mentioned. Garland hints at a rancid Americana, the "Winter Wonderland" sequence especially, but the theme is not explored. Georgia unconvincingly stands in for Pennsylvania and West Virginia. 

None of this would matter if Garland had imbued his central characters with believable back stories or a mythic aura. Veteran photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is passing the torch to neophyte Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). The relationship culminates in an act of self-sacrifice that begs for mythos, but Garland is not that type of artist. He tends to to offer explanations, even in the allegorical fable Men, rather than mystery rites. Here his explicatory asides consist of half-assed farm backgrounds for the distaff duo and a montage of Ms. Dunst pointing her lens at wartime horrors across the globe. We are supposed to believe that a backlog of trauma is finally causing Lee to crack, but Ms. Dunst seems to be imitating Grumpy Cat. Since Ms. Dunst has shown she can play complex mental states, particularly in Melancholia, the onus is on Mr. Garland here for failing to provide context. Ms. Spaeny is even more at sea here than Ms. Dunst.

I want to stress that I did not hate, hate, hate, Civil War. Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson have some nice moments. The assault on Washington DC builds with inexorable momentum. The soundtrack is exemplary. Civil War is Garland's most technically impressive film. Ultimately, though, it is also his most uninspired and impersonal work. Civil War most clearly shows off Garland's Achilles heel, an inability to pictorially convey dread and mortification in a horrific setting. The horror in Civil War is never palpable.

Anyone but You

Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney

Will Gluck's Anyone but You, the most conspicuous example of bourgeoise capitalist excess in the cinema since Crazy Rich Asians, will be chiefly remembered as the film that established Sydney Sweeney as a star and box office draw. Not much lurks under the film's surface, but that may have been part of its popular appeal. Anyone but You boasts two stunning Sydneys, an upbeat and chipper tone, a copious number of ripped and unclothed bodies, veteran actors cashing checks, upscale settings, food porn, and a plot that would have been old hat in 1923.

Like Wedding Crashers and Crazy Rich Asians, the film uses the setting of a wedding as a backdrop for the ebb and flow of a romance between the two leads. Brickbats fly, as do busses. The film chiefly depends on the chemistry of the two leads. Male lead Glen Powell is a physical presence, but lacks Sweeney's charisma. They both are adept at physical schtick, but Sweeney is superior at repartee despite a tendency to talk through her nose. Gluck wisely uses the supporting characters as a chorus arrayed around the central romance, but the stellar talent assembled (Bryan Brown, Rachel Griffiths, Dermot Mulroney, and a host of youngsters) is underused. That is because Gluck and Ilana Wolpert's script opts for a tone of featherweight satire. Despite the improbabilities of the narrative, the lunacy of a screwball romantic comedy is never unloosed.

Gluck has directed one comic success, Easy A, and a number of less rewarding ones, including Anyone but You. Gluck does succeed in honoring one of the tenets of comedy, he keeps the film moving along at a brisk pace. This and Ms. Sweeney's talents make the film almost watchable despite its second hand nature. Part of Ms. Sweeney's appeal is that she embodies a healthy female sexuality all too absent in the American cinema. She has her physical attributes, but also distinctive features, like her height and her hooded eyes, that could be taken as flaws. Because she is a first rate actress, though, she exudes a sensuality far beyond the capabilities of such pneumatic constructs as Megan Fox. Ms. Sweeney provides the only intimations of reality, albeit idealized, in Anyone but You. 

The Zone of Interest

Christian Friedel and Sandra Huller

Distance is the distinctive feature of Jonathan Glazer's Martin Amis adaptation, The Zone of Interest. There is nary a close-up and little characterization. The camera work is generally, though not always, stationary and at a distance from the characters in order to emphasize their surroundings. Given that those surroundings include the Auschwitz concentration camp which one of the main characters, Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) is the Commandant in charge of, little exegesis is needed on historical context or motivation. Hoss' wife, Hedwig (Sandra Huller), seems to be the tougher and more ambitious of the two. As we see them go about their domestic routine, the camera's distance prevents us from, in any way, empathizing with them. Hedwig handles the servants cruelly, piling on anti-Semitic invective. She acquires the furs, jewels, and fripperies of the Holocaust's victims and preens as the "Queen of Auschwitz". Glazer has stated the last thing he wanted to do was glamorize the Nazis. His aesthetic distance and emphasis on the domestic chores of the household done by cowed servants and prisoners create the desired effect.

Glazer moves the camera in The Zone of Interest to emphasize the Hoss' wickedness. A long dolly sequence of Hedwig guiding her mother through her estate, which includes elaborate gardens, a greenhouse and a small pool ("barefoot servants, too."), displays her overweening pride. Later, when she has learned her husband is about to be transferred, Glazer tracks her as she determinedly rushes to confront him: the movement exemplifying Hedwig's furious wrath. Like most husbands, Rudolf folds like a deck chair and Hedwig is mollified that she will not have to move from her precious Auschwitz.

Most of the time, though, the camera is fixed and unwavering in its view of commonplace depravity. The film is slow and deliberate, but this pays dividends throughout the film. A shot with the greenhouse in the background is repeated to great effect when, the second time, we see a line of smoke moving, signaling that another train has arrived to bring its bedraggled human cargo to their doom. Nearly all the effects Glazer brings to The Zone of Interest are fruitful. The soundscape and Mica Levi's score have been justly praised for evoking the horrors that remain out of site to the viewer. The astonishing thermal sequence links a resistance member's valor with the heroism in the fairy tales Rudolf tells his reads his children. Throughout, the glowing cinematography shows off the beauty of nature in contrast to the ugliness that man has wrought. 

Jonathan Glazer's four feature film are disparate, but share exemplary craft and a consistently dour view of humanity. Since Birth, Glazer has shifted away from characterization to such an extent that the camera regards his characters now as if he were surveilling alien beings. This, ultimately, may prove unrewarding, but in adapting difficult material like The Zone of Interest it has its merits. 

Late Night with the Devil

David Dastmalchian

Cameron and Colin Cairnes' Late Night with the Devil, the Australian siblings' third feature film, is a superior B film. Like their previous work, the duo mix horror and comic elements in the tale of a man who has sold his soul. In 1977, we meet Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a late night talk show host frustrated at running behind Johnny Carson in the ratings battles. Delroy and his producer, in a desperate bid for viewers' eyeballs, book a parapsychologist and an allegedly possessed girl. What could possibly go wrong?

Ultimately, I did not find Late Night with the Devil especially frightening or unsettling. It is tightly wound mechanism that does not seek to make a lofty statement unless warning viewers not to make a deal with the devil constitutes one at this late date. Perhaps I have seen too many B horror films to be scared by one, but the dénouement of this film was so predictable that there was little suspense for me. However, the very predictability of a B genre film, be it a musical, comedy or horror film, is comforting to the audience. The Cairnes brothers know this and don't mess with the formula.

However, they inject the film with enough satiric glee, mostly poking fun at America in the 1970s and the talk show format, that I was thoroughly entertained throughout. The film begins with a montage of documentary footage of turmoil in the USA during the late 60s and early 70s. This leads to a montage of Delroy's career rise, one which is stifled by the dominance of Carson. I was stunned by how well the Australian duo portrayed the pop culture milieu of 1977. Leisure suits, bad haircuts, Billy Carter jokes, and earth tones are present and accounted for. The brothers also capture the print media of the era with glimpses of (doctored) covers of Newsweek. The Hollywood Reporter, and Mad. I was also impressed with the verisimilitude of the talk show within the film. . The rhythms and rituals of the era are impressively rendered. Then as now, most guests were stars pushing their latest product. Carson would do his famous monologue and skits. Also, the occasional animal act with the San Diego Zoo's Joan Embery, which Late Night with the Devil tips its cap to. Carson's competitors, chiefly Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and Joey Bishop, would often book more outlandish guests which Carson derided. The film features characters which call to mind Kreskin and Anton Lavey, both talk show mainstays of that period. 

The films effectively plays with different film stocks and ratios. The first shot of the film is of a television set and, after the introduction, the found "tape" of the fatal show is presented in a box format. This is intercut with "backstage" footage in widescreen black and white. The Cairnes parody trendy effects, like split screens and picture within picture, that were popularly used at the time. They won't be awarding statues to the Cairnes at next years' Oscar night, but the technical mastery displayed in Late Night with the Devil should give them a bigger budget next time. The cast is superb, particularly Mr. Dastmalchian, but also Ingrid Torelli, Laura Gordon, Fayssal Bazzi, and Ian Bliss. Michael Ironside's narration is exemplary, at once sober and ironic.

For those who enjoyed Late Night with the Devil, I would recommend the Cairnes brothers' first feature which is currently streaming on Tubi. 100 Bloody Acres, released in America in 2013, is a rural Australian Gothic with lots of gore. The film is very competent for a debut feature and boasts a strong cast, especially lead Damon Herriman.

The Royal Hotel

Jessica Henwick and Julia Garner

Kitty Green's The Royal Hotel reunites Ms. Green with Julia Garner, the star of Green's previous feature, The Assistant. Ms. Garner is once again employed by a creepily sinister patriarchy, this time in the Australian outback rather than Manhattan. Ms. Garner is joined by Jessica Henwick and they play 'Canadian" vacationers who are stranded in Sydney at the end of a cruise without cash. They somewhat improbably take a job working in a pub hours from civilization. The owner (Hugo Weaving) is a shifty drunk and the clientele consists of miners with varying degrees of pathology. These are the worst possible louts for our heroines to put up with and the misogyny is pronounced. The look of the film is a dusty brown, all the sets are flea bitten. There are even dead snakes in jars festooning the bar.

As with The Assistant, the film is done with great taste and care, but I am more ambivalent about the results. The cast is very good and Green succeeds in conveying the seedy and exploitive nature of the bar. Her exterior sequences are not as effective. Compare how Rose Glass uses the same kind of desert settings to amplify her themes in Love Lies Bleeding. Except for a brief glance at the Southern Hemisphere night sky, the outdoor locations in The Royal Hotel add little. 

The Royal Hotel has very little momentum and is too predictable. We know that our heroic duo will ultimately vanquish their male oppressors as soon as they are greeted with genital epithets. Thus, terror is never ratcheted up and there is little of the mortification or sense of the uncanny that are needed for the film's horrific elements. Worth seeing for the fine performances alone, The Royal Hotel feels like Ms. Green is treading water thematically.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

   
Pham Thien An's Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell deservedly won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2023. It was released in America, briefly, in January, was praised by critics, but has baffled or infuriated the general public. This is not surprising for a very slow. three hour flick about the spiritual crisis of a young Vietnamese man. Fans of Chantal Akerman, Bela Tar, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul should step right up, but if these names are a mystery to you, pause. Mr. Pham employs extremely long takes, sometimes with tracking shots, most often with a stationary camera. The shots are not arbitrary attempts to show-off, but are linked with the film's themes and its attempt to trace the arc of its subject's religious quest.

The protagonist, also named Thien (Le Phong Vu), is a somewhat aimless twentysomething who, we eventually learn, records and edits wedding videos in Saigon. Thien's sister-in-law, Hanh, dies suddenly in an accident, leaving behind her five year old, Dao. Thien must travel with his nephew and the corpse back to the rural town their families hail from. After the funeral, family and friends keep vigil at the local chapel. Thien finds a sanctuary for Dao at Catholic home where one of Dao's caregivers is a former flame of Thien's who has donned the habit. Dao's father (Thien's brother),Tam, disappeared years ago and Thien spends the last section of the film searching for both Tam and a sense of solace for his own troubled soul. He dreams of almost finding Tam, but his brother remains elusive. The film ends with Thien bathing baptismally in water, finding peace, at least for a moment. This points to a new beginning for Thien, the rebirth that is augured by the title and is found everywhere in nature in this beauteous film.

The pantheistic Catholicism of Inside the Yellow Cocoon should not have moved an apostate Catholic like me, but Mr. Pham's skill at integrating his themes within his dawdling narrative stunned me. Take the opening sequence, which introduces us to Thien in Saigon. The scene is set at a cafe which adjoins a scholastic soccer arena. Pham shows us a glimpse of the game with a mascot gyrating then tracks right to a stationary shot of his protagonist and his cronies enjoying a beer. Within this lengthy set-up, the parameters of film's spiritual conflict are framed: doubt versus religion with Thien an uneasy proponent of faith. The tone of the scene belies the serious conversation. These are indolent, capitalistic young adults luxuriating in their leisure as much as brewpub denizens do in my town of Portland. Suddenly, we hear a terrible crash and the camera tracks right to a scene of a motorcycle crash. Death is juxtaposed with life's sensual pleasures.

This juxtaposition occurs again when Thien receives a call telling him of Hanh's death. Tien is in a massage parlor, but the call prevents him from receiving a happy ending. Pham films this scene with screens and partitions partially obscuring our view, a strategy he employs throughout. Graven images, mesh, curtains and the like add to the visual texture of the film, but also point to one of Pham's central themes: that the ultimate veil of existence cannot be parted until death. The mystery of the afterlife cannot be parsed in this life and must be met with faith by believers. 

Pham also juxtaposes corporeal reality with intimations of the beyond in another lengthy sequence. Thien is tasked with paying the maker of Hanh's funeral shroud. That gentleman is an elderly one, initially too proud to take payment. The camera. at first, views the interaction between Thien and the shroud maker outside his abode through a window. Thien and the man achieve a rapport with the shroud maker reminiscing about his service in the South Vietnamese Army. The camera zooms into the room as the two become more intimate. The camera eventually pans the room festooned with religious icons and army certificates. The shroud maker shows Thien the bullet that wounded him in the war. The shroud maker then takes Thien's hand to show him his wound, an image of corporeal mortality extremely similar to Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Pham then boldly cuts to a shot of a window with tattered screens that shouts out to Lee Miller's Portrait of Space. The tactile body is juxtaposed with intimations of infinite space.

Pham's Catholic rigor will limit his appeal, much as it did for Rossellini and Bresson. Yet, his vision is very much his own and Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell palpitates with a very personal spiritual fervor. The parishioners go about their religious duties dwarfed by the cycles of nature. Yet, their Catholic rituals pay homage to the greater natural rituals that occur on Earth whether they be constructed by chaos or Yahweh. The sun also rises. The beauty of the rituals in Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell belies Pham's belief. I may not share Pham's belief, but I do find a sense of shared reality in his work that I find heartening. The film is a mammoth masterpiece with many avenues to explore and I haven't even brought up its reference to It's a Wonderful Life. A masterpiece then, for those who wish to seek it. 

Scrapper

Harris Dickinson and Lola Campbell

Charlotte Regan's is a vital and imaginative working class drama. Twelve year old Georgie (Lola Campbell) lives in a project in Chigwell, just northeast of London. An orphan when we meet her, Georgie is able to pawn off an imaginary uncle as her guardian and scrounges a living as a bicycle thief with her pal, Ali (Alin Uzun). Georgie's criminal activities link her with the roots of neorealism, specifically with Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, as does Ms. Regan's general approach, That said, Georgie has little in common with the sad sack duo in Bicycle Thieves. She displays a scrappiness, one meaning of the title, and a joie de vivre that brings to mind Dickens' Artful Dodger. 

In quieter moments, she pines for her mother watching old videos of them together on their phone. She has a void in her life and, suddenly, the father she has never met shows up unannounced. Her Dad, Jason (Harris Dickinson), scarcely seems more responsible or mature than his daughter. Soon, he is accompanying Georgie on her petty criminal rounds. Ali warms to him, but Georgie is wary. Her reconciliation with Jason is predictable, but the acting is so top drawer that I didn't care. Harris Dickinson's talent has already been on display, but Regan also draws strong performances from first timers Campbell and Uzun.

There is also a strain of magical realism that runs through Scrapper that leavens some of the grit of the narrative. Regan and cinematographer Molly Manning Walker heighten the pastel hues of the colors, giving the film more of a storybook feel rather than a realistic one. Regan cuts, in a different aspect ratio, to choral asides from Georgie's social workers, school mates, neighbors, and partners in crime. This asides are chiefly comic in tone. Finally, there is the tower of scrap that Georgie has assembled in one room of her apartment. Ostensibly a tower to reach her mother up in heaven, this motif gives us an insight into the dissociative aspects of Georgie's mental state. Regan uses whip pans and jump cuts so the audience can grok Georgie's psychic dislocation. Not all of the techniques Regan utilizes work, but this is the most promising first feature of 2023.

The Red House

Allene Roberts and Edward G, Robinson

Delmer Daves' The Red House, from 1947, has been described by a number of writers as a noir, but I would group it within a strain of rural American Gothic which had its roots in Griffith and has produced such disparate picture as Frank Borzage's Moonrise, Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, and Ti West's Pearl. The Red House isn't quite as good as those pictures, but, despite a hackneyed plot, still packs a visual and thematic wallop. Pete Morgan (Edward G. Robinson) and his sister Ellen (Judith Anderson) run a rural farm and take care of their adopted daughter, the teenaged Meg (Allene Roberts). Pete has a wooden leg and is getting on in age, so he hires a local lad, Nath (Lon McCallister) to help out with the chores. Ellen is smitten with Nath, but he is firmly within the clutches of the local vamp, Tibby, played by the ravishing Julie London. Tibby, in turn, is toying with the advances of local ne'er-do-well, Teller (Rory Calhoun). All of this points to trouble, especially when Pete repeatedly admonishes all to steer clear of a mysterious woods which contains the titular abode. The new generation can't leave it be and, as in the past, blood will be spilled.

As with any other Hollywood hallucination, but especially within the oeuvre of Delmer Daves where tall tales are recounted with gusto. suspension of disbelief is required. However, if one is willing accept that Mr. Robinson and Ms. Anderson could be brother and sister, than one can swallow the other improbabilities Daves dredged from George Agnew Chamberlain's source novel. What Daves was able to conjure from this pulpy material is somewhat disturbing aura of sexual repression and transference, augmented by the keening loneliness of rural America. The love triangle of the film's present, we too soon realize, is an echo of the past. Nearly all the characters want to leave their circumstances, even if it means escaping into the past. Daves and cinematographer Bert Glennon (Stagecoach, Daves' Destination Tokyo) offer devastating close-ups of his junior players, all yearning to leave the farm or at least get laid. Glennon is able to make the forest sequences mildly creepy whether they are shot in Sonoran exteriors or soundstages.

Creeping around the forest, as the film's male monster of the Id, is Rory Calhoun. Calhoun's large frame is well utilized by Daves and it is heartening to see him when he showed youthful promise. Daves also draws strong performances from Ms. London and Ms. Allene. Allene's winsome willfulness reminded me of Teresa Wright. Robinson and Anderson are such consummate pros that it is easy to overlook how commanding their technical skills are. The Red House was the first film produced by Robinson's production company, Thalia Productions and it displays a desire to make a B film with a personal touch; a little off the grid from Hollywood. Daves sometimes succumbs to the cornpone that would bedevil even his finest films, the prayer scene is especially painful, but also frames perfectly a watery demise for Robinson that rivals his greatest death scenes. The Red House also features the final film appearance of Ona Munson. 

Love Lies Bleeding

Katy O'Brian and Kristen Stewart

Rose Glass' Love Lies Bleeding has excited me more than any 2024 release thus far. Ms. Glass' film is more expansive and startling then her very good debut, Saint Maud. Part of this is because A24 has given Ms. Glass a bigger budget and she proves that she is up to the challenge. The superb cast brings a uniformity amongst the players that was not achieved in Saint Maud. That film proved Ms. Glass had an eye, but Love Lies Bleeding marks a technical advance. The film's soundscape is a quantum leap over Saint Maud, giving the new flick a truly unsettling tactile quality. The contrapuntal editing gives the film a disarming propulsion that helps Ms. Glass avoid the saggy passages of her debut. 

Kristen Stewart stars as Lou, a lonely lesbian who works at a gym in a seamy New Mexico small town in 1989.  Into her world walks Jackie (Katy O'Brian), a drifting bodybuilder as isolated and down on her luck as Lou. The two fall into a tumultuous and passionate affair. However, they are unable to avoid becoming entangled with Lou's dysfunctional family. Lou's estranged father (Ed Harris) is a sinister patriarch who runs a gun range and is on the radar of the FBI for his criminal endeavors. Lou's sister (Jena Malone) is married to an abusive lout played by Dave Franco. The decor and design of the film is strikingly grotesque, Harris' character even collects bugs. The hair is concistently and pronouncedly ugly. This look may not be everyone's cup of tea, Mom you should avoid this one, but it is consistent with a film that seeks to exist at the intersection of noir and horror.

As in Saint Maud, Glass views human relationships ambivalently. The characters, whether lovers or family members, murmur 'I love you', but as Bob Dylan puts it, "passion rules the arrow that flies." The love they pledge is inspired by eros which is much more volatile than agape. That is why so many of the characters turn on a dime emotionally from love to hate. The unconscious tug of the passions in Ms. Glass' films are symbolized by the forces and features of nature. The vortex in Saint Maud, caverns and fissures in Love Lies Bleeding. In Glass' latest film, the unconscious demons of one's past lies below the surface of the earth. Escape is possible, but only at a deadly cost. 

Ed Harris

Afire

Thomas Schubert and Paula Beer

Christian Petzold's Afire is another terrific film from one of the premier auteurs of this century. We meet Leon (Thomas Schubert), a young writer, and Felix (Langston Uibel), a budding photographer, as they travel to Felix's family vacation home on the Baltic Sea. There they hope to work on their respective projects in solitude, but their plans go awry. First their car breaks down and then they discover that Felix's mother has sublet the home to a young woman named Nadja (Paula Beer). The sullen Leon especially resents this imposition and behaves like a spoiled brat towards both Felix and Nadja.

Leon is quite taken with the alluring Nadja, but is too pig-headed and boorish to try to charm her. He spies a hunky lifeguard leaving the house one night and assumes he is Nadja's boyfriend; one of many mistaken assumptions he makes about Nadja. The lifeguard, named Devid, is befriended by Felix, further alienating Leon. Petzold stresses the apartness of Leon, a bearish young man not comfortable in his own skin. Leon is hyper-sensitive, a boon for a writer, but one of the main factors reasons behind his social awkwardness. Leon is shown to be a voyeur, spying from a distance on his companions and Petzold's stresses Leon's essential isolation with many distant shots from Leon's POV. 

As the vacationing young folk juggle their elective affinities, environmental disaster looms in the background. A huge forest fire is rampaging and eventually threatens our protagonists. Yet, Petzold does not ultimately view the romantic roundelays of his cast as a case of fiddling while Rome burns. He views love as perhaps our only means of salvation as disaster looms. Even a churlish schlub like Leon can be redeemed by caring for others. His love for Nadja breaks him out of his shell and allows him to be a more open and empathic being. Nadja does not coddle Leon, she is forthright in telling him his current manuscript is shite, but her candor helps free him to be a better writer and human. 

That said, I'm not sure Petzold really earns his invocation of Rossellini's Voyage to Italy when he shows us the entwined lovers' remains left by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. It synchs nicely with the tragic aspects of his own film, but feels a little tacked on. I do think he has succeeded in creating a thoughtful bourgeoise romance in the spirit of Eric Rohmer, his avowed model for this film. Afire captures the seaside Romantic quakes and aches of such Rohmer films as Pauline a la plage and Le rayon vert.

Pacifiction

Benoit Magimel

Albert Serra's Pacifiction is a lengthy, sinuous portrait of political skullduggery and corruption in French Polynesia. A merging of French indolence and Tahitian androgyny, the film, like much of Serra's work, is better at setting a mood than at telling a story. It is a good hang, sort of like Altman's more meandering character studies such as California Split. However, the film is not emotionally affecting. The audience has no one to root for, certainly not the lead, a louche French (oxymoronic?) commissioner drolly played by Benoit Magimel. That may be part of the point.

Magimel performance is terrific and holds together the motley collection of scenes and scenic asides Serra has assembled. By day, we watch Magimel's official schmooze with the locals, trying to mollify their concerns about nuclear testing and their desire for a casino. By night, the protagonist hobnobs with shady underworld figures and naval officers. He seems to have financial interests in a hotel and nightclub where the staff members and hangers on fawn over him. The nightclub scenes are a visual delight, bathed in moody blue lights that paint the club into a murky arena of sexual tourism.

En toto, I don't think Pacifiction adds up to much. The film ends with a French admiral spouting a militarist speech that yearns for the days of French power and prestige. I'm chuffed that Serra does not have nostalgia for the days of French colonial power, but think the rise of a new OAS is extremely unlikely. Pacifiction is gorgeous to look at and that is something, but its intimations of meaning are as vaporous as a Tahitian ocean spray.

Tori and Lokita

 

Joely Mbundu and Pablo Schils

I've kinda been avoiding Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Tori and Lokita since it was released in America last March. I've usually liked or at least not hated the brothers' films, but neorealism has never been my cup of tea. However, I found Tori and Lokita, their twelfth fictional effort, to be their best film thus far. The documentary roots of the two sibling filmmakers remain, but their foregrounding of their two protagonists' struggles to settle in Belgium make this their most affecting film. The sociological background clutter in the Dardennes' films often leads to tedium, but from its first frame, a suffocating close-up of Lokita (Joely), this film focuses on the plight of two orphans in a shit storm with concision and restraint. 

Lokita is 17 and Tori (Pablo Schils) is almost twelve when we meet them living in a refugee center in Lieges. They are posing as siblings even though they are from different countries. They bonded in Sicily where smugglers initially brought them and are actually closer than most siblings. Both work for a chef who has a sideline dealing drugs. They are constantly being hassled by the abusive chef (a terrific Alban Ukaj), by immigration authorities, the police and by the smugglers who use them as cash cows. The film's focus remains on their plight, we see little of Lieges, which emphasizes the few choices facing the protagonists. Things get more claustrophobic when Lokita is shut up working as a tender in a marijuana grow house for three months. In response, the resourcefulness of the heroic duo is heartening throughout, but there is little doubt that they have no exit from a life of servitude. 

Tori and Lokita bond over music. Their vocal duos, both for restaurant patrons and when they are together alone, are virtually the only moments of solace in the film. They speak to a union of souls that transcends the numbed horror of their everyday lives. The Dardennes brothers continually have shown individuals struggling against inequality and injustice. Tori and Lokita succeeds because the performances of Mr. Schils and Ms. Mbundu humanize what could have been the usual anti-capitalist screed. The sisterly sacrifice that concludes the film reminded me of Sansho the Bailiff and I can think of no higher praise.

By Love Possessed

Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

John Sturges' By Love Possessed, from 1961, is a feeble melodrama that helped engender the downturn of Lana Turner's career. She had received her only Oscar nomination for 1957's Peyton Place. Then, her popularity buoyed by the public reaction to the Johnny Stompanato scandal, she had one of the biggest successes of her career in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life. James Gould Cozzens' novel had supplanted Peyton Place on the best-seller list. Since Cozzens book had a superficially similar sex in a small town plot, it seemed like a surefire hit, but it was not too be. The primary culprit is Sturges who was unsuited to direct this overheated soap opera. In his defense, producer (Walter Mirsch) and star (Turner) made shooting difficult with constant demands for script revisions. Sturges soon lost interest in the film and acknowledged that it was not one of his better efforts.

This was not a foredoomed project, the cast is good and the film boasts photography by Russell Metty whose work in similar melodramas with Sirk (including Imitation of Life) is dazzling. This is not the case here. There are a few nice shots of autumn foliage, but overall there are very little of the exteriors shot in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Sturges gives us a few feeble pans of Zimbalist walking across the town square, but the regional specificity of the novel is absent and the interiors are anonymous. Compare the gazebo scene here with the footage of Rock Hudson's cabin in All That Heaven Will Allow, also lensed by Metty, and it is pretty obvious which director was better at integrating soundstage footage with exteriors. The love scenes between Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman are magical, the ones between Turner and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. mundane. Sturges' camera placement is often deficient. Notice how in Thomas Mitchell's first scene, when he becomes angry, the actor's outburst is wasted because we can't see his eyes. 

Besides Sturges, the other main problem with the film is Zimbalist. The success of the television show 77 Sunset Strip had made him a star on the small screen. Mirsch had hoped that the actor's TV stardust would translate onto the large screen, but it was not to be. Successful attorney Arthur Winner, Zimbalist's character, a is supposed to be bit of a prig, but needs to seem unmoored by his passion for Turner. Zimbalist has the prig part down pat, but can't evoke volcanic passion. His scenes with Turner have no fire to them and this hurts a film supposedly about the damaging power of eros. Zimbalist was too much a Ralph Bellamy, second level leading man type. He found his niche on television again as a throwback fifties style authority figure on The FBI, busting the younger and scuzzier new breed of actors who were to rise in the sixties. Turner is pretty good, but struggles with her drunk scenes.

George Hamilton and Susan Kohner play the film's young lovers and fare a bit better than their older counterparts. Kohner quit the screen after marrying in 1964 and it was the screen's loss. This film reunited her with Turner after Kohner's breakthrough role in Imitation of Life and she is once again quite effective. She and Hamilton were apparently an item offscreen as well. I think I underestimated Hamilton in my youth because of his louche image and his problem with accents in films such as Viva Maria! and Your Cheatin' Heart. He is quite good here and well displays the carriage of a man not comfortable in his own skin. Jason Robards does well enough in an impossible part: Turner's crippled husband with the handicap being the usual Hollywood shorthand for impotence. I also enjoyed seeing Barbara Bel Geddes (underutilized as usual), Everett Sloan, Yvonne Craig (Batgirl to my generation), Gilbert Green, and Carroll O'Connor.

I must admit that my primary interest in watching this film was my admiration for James Gould Cozzens who James Dickey rightly called "the least-read and least-understood of major American novelists." 💜By Love Possessed, the novel, was nearly six hundred pages long and could only be done properly if made into a eight hour mini-series. That said, Cozzens was fairly content with what screenwriter Charles Schnee did to condense the film into a feature length format. However, Schnee was so incensed with the liberties taken with his script, that he had his name taken off the credits and replaced with a pseudonym, John Dennis. Schnee streamlined the novel, jettisoning many of the supporting characters of the book, and eliminated the book's intricate flashback structure. He did what he was hired to do: take a complex novel which features a detailed portrait of a community and a profession (the law) and boil it down into a soap opera suitable for its female star.

Traces of Cozzens' book remain in the film, but only traces. After experimental and tentative novels in the 1920s, Cozzens gained recognition with such fully mature works as S.S. San Pedro, Castaway, and The Last Adam. The latter was turned into a good film, Doctor Bull, the first of three vehicles in which John Ford directed Will Rogers. The film was tailored to Rogers' folksy appeal and, like By Love Possessed, has only a tangential relationship to Cozzens' novel. Cozzens novels in the thirties still flirted with experimentalism and are more monophonic than his later output. A renewed thematic intensity and polyphonic scope emerged with The Just and the Unjust and especially, Guard of Honor, his best book. It beat out a field that included two very different novels of World War 2, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions to win the 1949 Pulitzer Prize. By Love Possessed marked Cozzens commercial high point, buoyed by a Time magazine cover, and the beginning of his critical decline. Initial criticism was highly laudatory, but Dwight Macdonald's pan of the book in Commentary led to a critical reappraisal from which Cozzens reputation has never recovered.

There is some merit to Macdonald's criticisms.  I could not even begin to summarize them, but will always treasure his censure of the book's "queer strangled sententiousness". Cozzens does indeed build a thicket of Jamesian prose in By Love Possessed, but I find the novel's labyrinthine pages exhilarating rather enervating. Cozzens real art crime was his championing of elitism just when the mud tide of the Beats was beginning to rise. Like Howard Hawks, Cozzens valorizes professionals, doctor and lawyers, soldiers and sailors, not dharma bums. Now I like the Beats, but honest plural criticism should also include the occasional cranky reactionary. I highly recommend all the novels I have listed above. The film of By Love Possessed is a mangled byproduct so far away from the imagination of James Gould Cozzens that it omits the book's chief symbol: an antique French clock bearing the legend in Latin, love conquers all.

💜 See Matthew J. Bruccoli, James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart

Nanny

Anna Diop

Nikyatu Jusu's Nanny was praised by critics and buried upon release, somewhat suitably I think. It is an interestingly arty horror film about a Senegalese emigre struggling as a nanny in Tribeca, NYC. Aisha (Anna Diop) has left her young son with relatives back in Dakar while toiling as a nanny for a haute bourgeoise couple. The social elements, particularly Aisha's alienation, are effectively rendered, but the foreboding visions of horror that plague Aisha come off as overly fussy and academic. The recurrent use of water imagery, with various African mythological figures seemingly coming to life to bedevil our heroine, attempts to milk the notion of the collective unconscious, but is not particularly scary or uncanny looking. The horror seems thought out, but not felt. 

The other major drawback is Ms. Diop. She is serviceable, but little more. stiff and unanimated even when going out her gourd. Michelle Monaghan is well cast as a craven Karen type, but flubs her drunk scene. Leslie Uggams looks great at 80, but her part requires her to deliver her the film's moral as if she was addressing a freshman seminar. Still, Jusu wrangles some charismatic and memorable performances out of her cast: particularly Sinqua Walls, Morgan Spector, and Princess Adenike. The production design and costumes are superb and Jusu knows how to utilize them with her camera. When Aisha borrows a snappy red dress from her employer, Jusu archly implies that she is donning, only for a moment, white privilege. Aisha's young charge is usually clad in sparkly (spoiled) princess attire. Significantly during the only truly shared moment between the two, the young girl is in animal prints.

Nanny looks gorgeous, but that sometimes works against the movie. The film is the type where the characters drink white wine with soul food and the bright colors makes the party scenes look like Benneton or pharmaceutical ads. The horror is supposed to leak out of these shiny happy bourgeoise facades, but Jusu fails to integrate theme with form. However, there are some suitably queasy moments when sick greens vie with angry reds. Ms. Jusu is a gifted visual talent, the lighting and color of this film ranks among the best I've seen in the last few years and I hope Ms. Jusu returns with a more suitable scenario. 

Tokyo Drifter

Tetsuya Watari in a nifty powder blue suit

Seijun Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter, from 1966, is a delirious yakuza film that borrows tropes from Noir, Musical and Western films. One of over three score B films Suzuki churned out for Nikkatsu Studios during the 50s and 60s, the film is notable for its use of DayGlo, go go pop color. The lurid colors help the film, which has a very standard gangster plot, achieve an expressionistic feel akin to manga. The film's protagonist, Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari), belongs to a gang that is disbanding and he claims he wants to leave the criminal life behind. but, as anyone who has ever seen a gangster film will suspect, leaving that life behind proves impossible for Tetsu. He falls for a rival gang's moll who works as a nightclub singer and this further complicates his attempts to go straight. Even though he attempts to embrace solitude as a lone drifter, old rivals continually try to assassinate him. Soon, even his old criminal boss has betrayed him. 

Tokyo Drifter's plot is hackneyed and its characterizations thin, but the film's power lies in its dazzling mise en scene. The film resembles the technicolor musicals of the 50s with its fluorescent colors. Not only does Tetsu's lady love get to warble a few tunes, but Tetsu has his own signature tune, heralding his status as a lone drifter, which he croons whenever he starts a journey. Hajime Kaburagi's bold jazz score adds to the film's texture. Musical motifs using harmonica and whistling makes one think that Kaburagi and Suzuki were tipping their hat to Ennio Morricone's work in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. 

Red as a harbinger of death

Tokyo Drifter would have been a run of the mill B film without Suzuki's touch. He often uses visual ellipses, jump cuts and the like, because he knows his audience can fill in the blanks between incidents. This helps give the film a propulsive momentum. Suzuki jazzes up a standard B picture because he knows it is familiar fare that needed a new approach. Nikkatsu's features were all assigned scripts that were expected to be filmed in under a month. Suzuki would eventually alienate the Nikkatsu hierarchy, but not before leaving behind, despite his working constraints, a series of remarkable features.

Your Lucky Day

Dan Brown's Your Lucky Day is an above average B thriller that displays Brown's potential. The script, which Mr. Brown has been working for over a decade, pictures a Miami convenience store that becomes a war zone after a customer discovers that he has a lottery ticket worth $156 million. Brown establishes his primary theme of predatory capitalism from the get go, intercutting a minor drug deal with video streams featuring  examples of grander capitalistic excess. The director rather bangs you on the head with this message, but the film has enough hurtling narrative momentum to excuse both thematic overkill and the improbability of its plot.

The convenience store, which houses most of the action, becomes the setting for a 10 Little Indians like elimination of the cast. One of the strengths of the film is that you never know what character Brown will off next. The store also proves handy for one of Brown's visual coups, his use of surveillance footage. The stop action nature of the footage adds a chillingly spectral paranoia to a narrative in which the characters actions and fates seem predetermined. Brown visually rhymes the surveillance footage by shooting a deadly assault partially obscured by a passing train. We see the violent act in fits and starts, heightening the viewer's sense of dread and helplessness. 

Brown shows his facility with story structure and film craft, but Your Luck Day displays he needs to work on a mastery of dialogue and his players. The cast is not bad, just largely nondescript. The exception is the leading lady, Jessica Garza, who displays unusual talent for her age. Your Luck Day is nothing earthshaking, but I hope we don't have to wait another ten years for another feature from Dan Brown.