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.