Drive Away Dolls

Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan

Ethan Cohen's Drive Away Dolls is a collaboration with his queer missus, Tricia Cooke, who co-wrote and edited the picture. Despite the film's sapphic veneer, the film is not all that different, for better or worse, than the lesser comedies Ethan has crafted with his brother, Joel. Drive Away Dolls is a screwball, road based romantic black comedy with Margaret Qualley playing the screwball. We meet Qualley's character, Jamie, when she is in the process of cheating on her Philadelphia cop girlfriend, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein). Dumped by the aggrieved Sukie, Jamie resolves to go on a road trip in an attempt to strike another match and start anew. She enlists her buttoned down friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) for the journey, ostensibly to visit relatives in Tallahassee.

As soon as their journey begins, the viewer is pretty sure how it will end. The uninhibited Jamie will loosen Marian up and, as soon as Marian shakes her hair out of its pony tail, Jamie will take notice, quit her womanizing ways, and find true love with her companion. The complimentary, butch/femme duality is spelled out in their names: the androgenous Jamie and (Maid) Marian. Qualley is a hoot, adept with her character's rapid fire dialogue. Viswanathan has little to except to don the mask of repression.

Little does the distaff duo know, but their drive away vehicle contains not one, but two sought after MacGuffins. A parallel duo of male stooges is tasked with tracking down our heroines and securing the hidden and precious cargo. Their journey drives this duo apart as it brings the other two together. Unfortunately, the stooges are much less pungent and memorable than the ones played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare in Fargo and the bickering between the two is not compelling or amusing.

Similarly, the opportunity to satirize roadside Americana, as in Demme's Something Wild, is never seized upon. The film's production design and costumes are first rate, but hilarity is never unleashed. The broad, cartoonish character strokes are as much in evidence as in the Cohen brothers' other, lesser films and are equally wearisome. I liked the performances of Ms. Feldstein and Bill Camp and even dug the psychedelic flashbacks than concern the back story of one of the MacGuffins, but found the film to be, overall, thin gruel. Better than The Ladykillers, but not even as good as The Hudsucker Proxy, then.

The Runner

Madjid Niroumand

Amir Naderi's The Runner, from 1984. is an arresting example of neo-realism. Madjid Niroumand plays Amiro, an orphan eking out an existence on the bottom rung of Iranian society in the port city of Abadan. Amiro and his comrades earn a pittance collecting bottles that wash up on the shore of a local Persian Gulf beach. Home is the rusty deck of an abandoned freighter. Despite their precarious existence, Amiro and his companions retain a sense of youthful frivolity and playfulness. Amiro has pluck and energy, hence the title, and he is able to parlay those attributes into some forward social mobility. Eventually, he earns more money shining shoes and enrolls in school to learn to read. He watches the huge tankers at the port and the planes at the local airport, yearning for an escape that is not available to him. Naderi's direction never falls prey to mawkishness or sententiousness. The camera never lingers too long, the point is made and we move on. A good example of this is the brief shot of a one legged young man. Amiro register shock, but this brief moment is the film's only allusion to the Iran Iraq War, then at its height. Niroumand's performance is one of the most remarkable by a child in the 20th century.

One Way Street

An uncredited Jack Elam has the draw on Marta Toren and James Mason in One Way Street

Hugo Fregonese's One Way Street, a middling to good B Noir from 1950, was the first Hollywood film by the Argentine director. The flick is a brisk, yet brooding 79 minutes, alternately compelling and ludicrous. James Mason plays a Dr, Feelgood to a criminal gang whose boss is Dan Duryea at his most paranoid and cynical. That cynicism is shared by Mason's character who is described as having "no faith in anything". Mason swindles Duryea out $200,000 of robbery money and takes off with his moll, the latest Swedish import Marta Toren, on the way to Mexico. As in many of his films from this period, Mason gets to play a heel on the run, one of his specialties.

Unfortunately, the heel finds redemption south of the border. A savvy priest ensconces Mason and his lady in a small village where they find connubial bliss and where Mason ministers to afflicted villagers and their animals. A white savior bringing the wonders of science to the superstitious natives. There is lot of goo centered around the village children and the banditos featured seem leftover from the Mexican revolution. However, Mason is eventually located by Duryea and goes willingly to his fate. As Duryea, who is always most enjoyable as a total louse, puts it at one point, "Stop the silly drivel."

Fregonese never shirks from his job in One Way Street even when the script is at its most mawkish. He gives the ending of the film, a reprise of the doom laden opening, the notes of deterministic fatalism that are required for the Noir genre. His talents are best seen in The Raid and Black Tuesday. Mason is superb as ever. What a voice! The supporting cast is generally strong, particularly William Conrad (TV's Cannon), Jack Elam, and Basil Ruysdael. Ms. Toren was a lot better than I expected. She died prematurely at the age of 31 due to a cerebral hemorrhage.

The Halliday Brand

Bill Williams and Ward Bond

Joseph H. Lewis' The Halliday Brand, from 1957, is a very good B Western that tackles racism. That very American bugaboo is personified by Sheriff Dan Halliday (Ward Bond), not only the law of the county, but a successful rancher and cattle baron. This prideful and stubborn patriarch has two sons, the more conformist and aptly named Clay (Bill Anderson) and a more independent namesake (Joseph Cotten). He also has a daughter, Martha (Betsy Blair), who earns his wrath by falling for a half breed ranch hand, Jivaro Burris (Christopher Dark). An incidence of rustling gives Sheriff Halliday a pretext with which to arrest Jivaro. The Sheriff forms a posse to chase the rustlers and leaves the jail virtually unguarded, knowing that the sure to come lynching will eliminate the ranch hand. .

Violence spirals out of control and the Sheriff guns down Jivaro's white father (Jay C. Flippen) in a showdown. Dan Jr. has fallen in love with Jivaro's sister, Aleta (Viveca Lindfors), and vows to topple his father from his position of power. He begins a campaign of petty terrors such as barn burnings and cattle stampedes. The concerned citizens of the town, peeved at suffering from the results of a family quarrel, drop their support of Sheriff Halliday. All of this is told in flashback. We first meet Dan Jr as he is being summoned home by Clay some months later. Pa is on his deathbed and we are subsequently filled in on the events that lay behind this familial estrangement. We expect Pa to be penitent as he awaits facing his Maker, but The Halliday Brand is made of sterner stuff.

The film is one of many Hollywood films, mostly Westerns, that readdresses miscegenation after the Second World War. What had previously been viewed as abhorrent, most famously in The Birth of a Nation and Gone With The Wind, was accepted in a new spirit of tolerance that reflected the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. There were exceptions, particularly Charles Marquis Warren's pungent Hellgate, but most films of this era (Pinky, The Searchers, The Indian Fighter, The Unforgiven, Giant, etc.) preached racial tolerance and offered a tentative endorsement of miscegenation. One of the weaknesses of The Holliday Brand is that its theme is trumpeted with overly rhetorical flourishes that stick out.

Fortunately, one of Hollywood's deftest and most underrated character actors gets to embody racism in a way that transcends the high falutin' speeches. As Ward Bond galumphs around the ranch house set expertly designed by David S. Garber, he displays not a trace of grace, but a sense of ownership and entitlement. This is a characterization very far from the stoic heroism (Fort Apache) or comic bluster (The Searchers) Bond displays in the films of John Ford. It is a portrait of ignorant intransigence. Bond is working without the method, but with a single mindedness that embodies a character out of whole cloth. This should be the goal of any actor, not to act but to be.

Bond has more lines than Joseph Cotten and this is just as well. Cotten was born two years after Bond, so he cannot convincingly play his son. Despite appearing in lots of Westerns from Duel in the Sun to Heaven's Gate, I never find him convincing as a sodbuster or gun slinger. He should have always been a Doc in Westerns, if anything. It is painful to watch Cotten pitching woo to Viveca Lindfors, he is too old for these shenanigans, but the Swedish born Lindfors is even more egregiously miscast as a half breed. Betsy Blair gets to break out of the good girl mold she was stuck with and spews her character's vitriol with relish. 

The main reason to watch The Halliday Brand, besides Ward Bond, is Lewis' direction. He manages to find memorable moments out of threadbare material. Some camera set-ups in The Halliday Brand betray the haste of the production and the desire to shoot efficiently and fast. However there are numerous compelling sequences that display this B master's deft touch: the casual insertion of an impatient undertaker looking at his watch during a funeral, the showdown between Bond and Flippen, the lynching. Despite its bare bones production values, The Halliday Brand is a wonderment. 77 minutes of cinema without a trace of fat.

The Novelist's Film

Kim Min-hee and Lee Hye Yeong

Hong Sang-soo's The Novelist's Film is a minor triumph, a self reflexive look at an artist pivoting from a fallow period. Lee Hye Yeong plays Jun-hee, a novelist of a certain age who is grappling with her lack of artistic direction. She travels away from Seoul to a small town where a friend she has not seen in years owns a book store. With the help of her friend and a string of coincidences, Jun-hee is able to find inspiration and channel it into a film project. The scope of the film is small, but the performances are adept and the end effect heartening.

The film is shot almost entirely in high contrast black and white. Available light in the background washes out the depth of field, bringing our full attention to the amiable, but barbed interchanges in the foreground. Jun-hee's artistic quest surely mirrors Hong's own. The mask comes off in a brief color sequence late in the film when Kim Min-hee (Hong's sweetie) and the director burble "I love yous" to each other. Self-indulgent and talkie, The Novelist's Film, like the work of Erich Rohmer, is a conversational drama of erudite charm.

State Fair (1945)

Dana Andrews and Jeanne Crain

Walter Lang's State Fair is a technicolor musical that is just dotty enough to be entertaining. The material, based on Phil Song's novel, had been crafted into a tolerable film in 1933 with Henry King directing Janet Gaynor and Will Rogers. A disastrous 1962 version stars Pat Boone and Ann-Margret. The 1945 version contains the only score Rodgers and Hammerstein, who were distrustful of Tinsel Town, wrote directly for film. Since there is a dance cafe on the midway, the songs are reasonably well integrated into this wisp of a story. The hit song from the film was "It Might as Well Be Spring" which Richard Rodgers initially wanted to be an up tempo number.

State Fair's moon June tune plot tells of two siblings who find romance at the Iowa State Fair while their parents sweat out the results of the pickling and stock contests. Jeanne Crain falls for Dana Andrews while brother Dick Haymes has a brief fling with Vivian Blaine. The casting is spot on. Crain was the queen of the 20th Century Fox lot, both State Farm and the perverse masterwork Leave Her to Heaven ranked in the top ten for the year's box office, and this film's apple cheeked, yearningly innocent heroine is in her wheelhouse. The same is true with Dana Andrews as an almost cynical reporter. All he has to do is not fall over and pitch woo to Ms. Crain. Nice work if you can get it. Both Crain's and Andrews' song vocals were dubbed. Haymes, a crooner in the mold of Crosby who is largely forgotten today, is adequate. I think he is primarily here so there can be a shot of someone exclaiming, "Jeepers, that kid can sing." Blaine, only a sporadic film star, is the best of the lot as a savvy chanteuse. Charles Winninger and Fay Bainter, always welcome, play Pa and Ma. There are welcome cameo bits, particularly Henry Morgan as a crooked carny.

I have never found Walter Lang to be a particularly spirited or energetic director. He certainly embalmed the film version of The King and I. Luckily, there are enough carnival rides in State Fair to provide at least a semblance of dynamism. Also there is enough bizarre Americana to entertain: colorful country frocks, pigs engaging in barnyard antics, Donald Meek sampling mincemeat, Crain imaging that Ronald Colman, Charles Boyer, and der Bingle are murmuring sweet nothings to her. The studio fakery applied to this backlot musical seems entirely appropriate. The color photography by Leon Shamroy, who also shot Leave Her to Heaven, sparkles. State Fair  is beautifully mindless entertainment for an anxious nation awaiting loved ones.

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.