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. 

The Missouri Traveler

Gary Merrill and Lee Marvin

Jerry Hopper's The Missouri Traveler is an amiable and lackluster slice of Americana released in 1958. Brandon De Wilde stars as a circa 1900 runaway named Biarn who finds a home in Delphi, Missouri. He is mentored by two men, a kindly newspaper man played by Gary Merrill and a cruel planter played by Lee Marvin in his first starring role. Marvin has a love/hate relationship with the flower of the local gentry played by Mary Hosford. Ms. Hosford's presence is due to the fact that she was about to be married to the head of the production company responsible for the film. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. She is truly dreadful and her appearances are kept to a minimum. Fortunately, she appears in no other films and seems to have found her calling as a bride of rich men (Mr. Hosford was the John Deere heir) and a breeder of thoroughbreds.

The Missouri Traveler is kind of a horse picture aimed at adolescents, Biarn being a horse whisper of sorts. The picture was released by Disney's distribution company, but sank without a trace upon release. Biarn trains Merrill's horse, named Twister, to be a harness racer and the film culminates in a head to head competition with De Wilde and Marvin riding the sulkies. There are only about a dozen or so American films featuring harness  racing, but what stood out to me about this film is its undeniable status as a imitation John Ford flick. It was produced by Ford's son, Patrick, and features his son in law, the always welcome Ken Curtis. The role Curtis plays is not much different than the cornpone role he played for Ford in The Searchers which had also been produced by C. V. Whitney. The Missouri Traveler's cinematographer was Winton C. Hoch who also lensed She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, and The Searchers. The Technicolor images look marvelous and are, next to Marvin's performance, the film's chief asset. The Missouri Traveler has many of the hallmarks of a Ford film and may have been concocted with him in mind: there are donnybrooks, tempestuous lovers, political meetings in saloons, fisticuffs as a rite of manhood, Yanks and Rebs living in harmony, jibes against Temperance, and parade floats.

Unfortunately, Jerry Hopper is a journeyman director soon to find a haven on television. As with Andrew V. McLaglen, Ford's most obvious imitator, a quick comparison to the master demonstrates the verve and snap of Ford's style. The action scenes in The Missouri Traveler, fisticuffs and Marvin beating Twister, are poorly handled and lend no sense of danger or excitement to the proceedings. Hopper does milk his cast for all they are worth. The supporting players boast such familiar faces as Paul Ford, Frank Cady, and Mary Field, all doing yeoman work. Gary Merrill is in better shape than usual and the role of the avuncular editor suits him. 

I had heard of Brandon De Wilde before I ever saw him in a film. On long car trips or during a break in the evening, my parents would reminisce about the films they saw when courting. Soon they would be imitating little Brandon De Wilde and calling out to Alan Ladd, "Shane, Shane, come back Shane!" I could sense a glimpsing of a myth that was both powerful and ridiculous. One I would investigate in the future. Because of his premature death, an aura of tragedy has clouded De Wilde's career. The Missouri Traveler was made six years after Shane and showed that his aura of innocent vulnerability remained as he matured. This passive image would not help him become an adult star, but it augured years of character roles. He would have looked equally angelic and helpless even if he lived to eighty.

Marvin was thirty three during the filming of The Missouri Traveler and starting to emerge as a lead. After excelling in a batch of compelling supporting roles, mostly in Westerns or action films, he lends the flick the shot of sadistic villainy it sorely needs. His way with a whip makes this a dry run for Liberty Valence, his first A lead role. The Missouri Traveler is a tepid B picture, but it has moments that save it from me consigning it to obscurity, chiefly every second of Marvin's menace.

China Seas

Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, and Clark Gable

Tay Garnett's China Seas, from 1935, is a raffish and highly entertaining MGM production. The picture is a bit overstuffed for an 87 minute film with elements of adventure, action, romance, melodrama, and comedy. The cast is teeming with talent: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Rosalind Russell, C. Aubrey Smith, Lewis Stone, Hattie McDaniel, Akim Tamiroff, and Robert Benchley. The film is based on a 1930 work by English novelist Crosbie Garshin, his last before his death in a mysterious boating accident. Jules Furthman and James Kevin McGuiness, two screenwriting titans, are credited with the script, but I imagine many more had a hand in the finished product. 

China Seas is one of six films Gable and Harlow appeared in together and seems designed to generate the boffo box office of their first starring vehicle, Red Dust. Like that film, Harlow and Gable are two points of a romantic triangle with Harlow's endearing chippie being counterposed by a more reserved and refined rival, this time being played by relative newcomer Rosalind Russell. The role is a thankless one for Russell who doesn't even get as many romantic clinches with Gable as Mary Astor did in Red Dust. Gable plays a ship captain helming a steamer going from Hong Kong to Singapore. The journey is not a smooth one, of course, with romantic tumult, Malaysian pirates, and a typhoon besetting the crew and passengers.

Garrett handles the action set pieces well. During the typhoon, Gable heroically prevents a grand piano from smooshing the passengers, including a child played by Beery's daughter, Carol Ann. Gable then has to secure a steam roller which has slipped its chains and is wreaking havoc on deck. These scenes are impressive technical achievements for the time and stand up well today. Garnett is also adept at framing the rowdy humor and violence of the film which test the limits of the newly imposed Production Code. Andre Sennewald, in the New York Times, took the film to task for its depiction of violence (Gable is tortured with a "Malay boot" by the pirates and Lewis Stone has his ankle crushed by the same miscreants), but these moments are quite tame by today's standards. The dialogue has the pungent air of pre-Code films. C. Aubrey Smith, at his most droll and relaxed here, describes Gable as a "bull head" who likes to get "sensationally blotto" on shore. We first meet Harlow emerging from Gable's bathroom where she has been "showering the dew drops off the body beautiful."

I detect the touch of Furthman here, a knowing post-modern touch, referring back to Harlow's epochal bathing sequence in Red Dust. Likewise, there is a reference to the recent I Cover the Waterfront. Furthman was one of the first writers to recognize that the audience was willing to accept actors as both playing their character parts and their star persona selves. Furthman would constantly recycle dialogue and situations over the course of his career. Lewis Stone's character, an older officer trying to redeem a previous act of cowardice, is pretty much the same as Richard Barthelmess' in the Furthman scripted Only Angels Have Wings. Harlow, Gable, and Beery are all very comfortable playing their screen personas here. Beery, his star slipping while Harlow and Gable are on the rise, plays a villain in league with the pirates, but is still shown as largely avuncular.

China Seas is a satisfying entertainment, but not a perfect one. The humor is hit and mostly miss. Robert Benchley, a success in short films during the 30s, does his usual schtick as a drunken novelist. I guffawed once or twice, but the picture would not lose much by his absence. Certainly his going overboard twice is one time too many. Similarly, William Henry's role as a callow and nervous sailor is a hackneyed one and his bumbling antics are as funny as a crutch. Still, he carried on in Hollywood and can be seen gracing the background of many a classic film. China Seas suffers from its roots as a British novel. Russell does an OK British accent, but Gable doesn't even try and that was probably for the best. Beery trots out an Irish brogue, but only occasionally.

Adrian's outfits for Ms. Harlow are especially eye-popping. I love the dragon outfit in the scene with Hattie McDaniel above. A sheer outfit that Harlow wears in the typhoon clings to her body in a way that must have made the censors take pause. If anything, I underestimated Ms. Harlow's talents as a performer when I was younger. Now I see that she provided much needed pizazz to a staid studio. Similarly, it is a pity Tay Garnett worked so little for MGM where his boisterousness would have been a tonic. His tracking shots on deck and an effective zoom in on Gable when he realizes his love for Harlow display a firm hand on the wheel. The print of China Seas streaming on Tubi is, for once, first rate. 

Dune 2

Timothee Chalamet

My feelings about Denis Villeneuve's Dune 2 are pretty much the same as what I thought about its predecessor. Villeneuve's talents are displayed in his set pieces, the attack of the sand worms is impressive, but personal touches are absent. Whenever Villeneuve attempts to amplify his characters, Chalamet's visions of the future or Rebecca Ferguson dialogues with her unborn child, the visuals seem silly and trite rather than striking and visionary. Villeneuve handles his young lovers, Chalamet and Zendaya, less clunkily than George Lucas did in the Star Wars saga, but the cast is hit or miss. Austin Butler is a rousing villain, but Dave Bautista seems in over his head. Florence Pugh and Lea Seydoux are always valuable contributors, Rebecca Ferguson never. Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem bring much needed grit and humor, but Christopher Walken dodders. All in all, I was never bored by Dune 2, but, also, never entranced or moved. Chalamet's character is much more Machiavellian in Frank Herbert's novels, so it will be interesting to see if he can summon darker shadings for the inevitable part three. 

Princess Yang Kwei Fei

Emperor and concubine: Masayuki Mori and Machiko Kyo

Tubi is streaming a batch of films directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, a master director whose work is neglected in America. All his films are worth seeing, but I particularly urge you to watch such masterpieces as Sisters of the Gion (1936) and Ugetsu (1953) while you can. A masterpiece new to me was Princess Yang Kwei Fei from 1955. The film, in spectacular color, is a historical romance that verges on tragedy. Kwei Fei (Machiko Kyo) is a country bumpkin cousin in the powerful Yang clan. Kwei Fei goes from being a scullery maid to consort for the Emperor, helped along by ambitious men who seek advancement. Once Kwei Fei is ascendent, the Yang clan overreaches and provokes a bloody popular uprising. Kwei-Fei pays the ultimate price in the most elegant and memorable execution scene since Marlene Dietrich's in Dishonored. 

The narrative is based on the legend of the last Chinese Emperor of the T'ang dynasty and his concubine. The English title of this film is misleading in that Kwei Fei never becomes a princess or an empress. Mizoguchi filmed this foreign tale in Hong Kong in the studios of producer Run Run Shaw. The pairing of Kyo and Mori, the leads of Ugetsu which nabbed a Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, seemed to guarantee some kind of international return. Mizoguchi could not help but make a Mizoguchi film and deviated from the 8th Century CE Chinese chronicles and his screenwriter's efforts. Mizoguchi's Kwei Fei is far more idealized than the historical figure, far more a victim of male machinations in an age where women are bartered off by their clans. Kwei Fei's frankness about being a puppet manipulated by her clan endears her to the Emperor who is sick of toadies.

The other bind between the two is music and the use of music helps balance the film's bleakness. Particularly memorable is a festival scene in which the two lovers get a respite from their troubles by sampling street food and partying with the peasantry. However, the Emperor's love of music is a symbol of his indolence and augurs his downfall. He will shirk his official duties to comingle with his muses. The vibrant story book sets seem off-putting, but ultimately is affecting in mapping the plush artifice of the Emperor's cocoon. Certainly the bathing scene in Princess Yang Shei Fei signals a world of utter decadence that is due to be upended.

Mizoguchi works at a deliberate pace, refrains from depictions of violence, eschews spastic tracking and even close-ups: thus, he stands a world apart from popular commercial filmmaking. Characters move through his frame surrounded by screens, curtains, sliding doors, scrims, drapes, and arranged flowers. By film's end, these are all dust or in tatters. Andrew Sarris summed up the film as "Beauty and memory and vanity." I would add transience. On that note, I mourn the death of David Bordwell, a vibrant writer and scholar who was a great champion of Mizoguchi and film in general.

Cartesius

Roberto Rossellini on the set of Cartesius

Roberto Rossellini's Cartesius, a film he made for Italian television in 1974, shares the strengths and weaknesses of all the historical films he made for television after 1966. These films suffer from stiffness and didacticism, but I am sympathetic to Rossellini's intent because of the sheer volume of historical detail he manages to cram into these superficially modest efforts. Cartesius, a survey of the career of Rene Descartes, manages to touch upon the economic impact of New World exploration upon Europe, the Counter-Reformation, the plague, the the tulip craze, book burning, and the scientific breakthroughs of Harvey and Galileo. Despite its meagre budget, Rossellini paints a broad canvas tracing Descartes' peripatetic life which included stops in Paris, Breda, Leiden, Ulm, Poitiers, Amsterdam, Franeker, and, finally, Stockholm. Whew.

Rossellini pictures Descartes intellectual wanderlust as a reaction against his cloistered and cosseted youth spent receiving instruction from the Jesuits. Ugo Cardea, who had collaborated with Rossellini on The Age of the Medici, portrays well Descartes' restless spirit of rational inquiry, but also his brusque and pompous manner. In his historical films like Cartesius, Rossellini unblinkingly exalts humanistic heroes who attempted to spread enlightenment and vanquish superstition and ignorance.