I Saw the TV Glow

Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine

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

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

Golgotha

Robert Le Vigan and Harry Baur

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

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

                

Biff's Best Vintage Films Viewed in 2024

                               

 1)     Princess Yang Kwei-Fei                                     Kenji Mizoguchi                 1955

 2)     Summer Light                                                    Jean Grémillon                   1943

 3)     Chess of the Wind                                           Mohammed Reza Aslani      1976

 4)     How to Be Loved                                                 Wojciech Has                   1963

 5)     Dragnet Girl                                                        Yasujiro Ozu                      1933

 6)     Portrait of Madame Yuki                                   Kenji Mizoguchi                  1950

 7)     Victimas del Pecado                                           Emilio Fernández              1951

 8)     Two Girls on the Street                                         André De Toth                 1939

 9)     Desire                                                                      Sacha Guitry                  1937  

10)    César                                                                      Marcel Pagnol                1936

I also thoroughly enjoyed...

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

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

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

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

The Halliday Brand, The Runner

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder

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

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

Jenna Ortega

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

A Canterbury Tale

Sheila Sims later Lady Attenborough

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

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

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

Le Parfum d'Yvonne

Jean-Pierre Marielle and Sandra Majani

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

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

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

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

Bio Zombie

Jordan Chan and Angela Tong

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

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

State Funeral

Red Square, March 9th, 1953

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

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

Lest we forget: Picasso's memorial tribute to Stalin

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

Alex De Jonge, Stalin, pg. 481.

Saratoga

Clark Gable, Cliff Edwards, and Jean Harlow

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

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

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

Jack Conway, Harlow and Gable

Angels Hard as They Come

Charles Dierkop

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

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

Challengers

Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor

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

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

Blast of Silence

Allen Baron

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

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

Quick Takes, December 2024

Alec McCowen and Michael Redgrave in Time Without Pity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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