Act of Violence

Van Heflin on the run near the long gone Los Angeles funicular

I'm usually bored stiff by the films of Fred Zinnemann, but Act of Violence, from 1949, is one of his better pictures. Zinnemann is at his best when he can devote his solid craftsmanship to the mechanics of a well articulated and dynamic plot, such as with The Day of the Jackal. When he directs adaptations of plays (as with A Man For All Seasons or A Hatful of Rain) or musicals (Oklahoma!), his lack of visual dynamism makes the film a slog. Act of Violence opens, without the usual credits, in slam bang fashion as we witness gimpy Robert Ryan rush into a tenement apartment and hurriedly pack a rod. Robert L. Richards screenplay, from a story by Collier Young, has Ryan's character bent on vengeance towards a former buddy he knows betrayed him during the war which left him with a bum leg and vengeance on his mind.

The trauma of wartime experience hangs heavily over Act of Violence. Ryan's former buddy is played by Van Heflin who is living happily in a Southern California town with his wife (Janet Leigh) and small child. Heflin's character was in a POW camp in Europe with Ryan during the war. Heflin finked on Ryan and some comrades to the camp commandant just before an escape attempt. Heflin says he had good intentions, he believed the attempt was foolhardy, but his actions were a betrayal of trust and had fatal results. As soon as Ryan shows up, Heflin knows he has murderous intent and goes on the run to Los Angeles in order to save his skin. Zinnemann and cinematographer Robert Surtees (Ben Hur, The Graduate) give us ominous shots of Heflin darting about the tawdrier sections of nighttime LA. Heflin falls in with a crowd of scofflaws whose assistance brings about tragic consequences.  

One of the main reasons this film works so well is that its main players are all adroitly cast. Even at this early stage of his career, Robert Ryan was playing as many steely eyed villains (as in Caught) as he was playing heroic leads. He is perfect for this angry Ahab of a character who is solely bent on revenge. Heflin tended to be cast as characters undermined by weakness or over sensitivity in contrast to traditionally stolid leading men. His roles in Tennessee Johnson and Shane and in this film are prime examples of this. Leigh's role as an anxious spouse is hardly taxing, but she makes it heartfelt and memorable. The film has an impressive gallery of rogues populating the underworld of Los Angeles: especially Berry Kroeger as a gunsel and Taylor Holmes as a crooked lawyer. Best of all is Mary Astor in an unlikely casting coup as a bedraggled and down at her heels hooker who befriends Heflin. I won't soon forget her bragging to all concerned and no one in particular, "I get my kicks."

Mary Astor and Van Heflin

For what its worth, Act of Violence has much the same climax and is a better film than the over praised High Noon. There is a final showdown and even a shot of a ticking clock in Act of Violence's finale. The tragic denouement attempts to wring some sense of poetic justice out of the material. I'm not sure it succeeds, but I prefer it to Carl Foreman's attempts at profundity in High Noon. 

Jane Austen in Manhattan

Anne Baxter, Michael Wager, Kurt Johnson, and Sean Young

James Ivory's Jane Austen in Manhattan, first released in Britain in 1980, has a rather dismal reputation. The recent documentary Merchant Ivory, an insightful effort by Stephen Soucy, does not address the film at all, though a brief clip from the movie is displayed: the skyline of New York with the World Trade Center towers embraced by the pink glow of a sunset. I do feel that Jane Austin in Manhattan is a failure albeit one mitigated by more than a few interesting moments. 

The Merchant Ivory menage and film company, including screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins, had settled in New York during the 1970s. Jane Austen in Manhattan was the eighth screenplay that Jhabvala had concocted for producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory and was something of a fluke. The duo had purchased the rights to a play based on Samuel Richardson's novel Sir Charles Grandison by a youthful Jane Austen. However, the manuscript turned out to be a fragment, not a complete work. What of it there is shows little of Austen's talent. It is a knockoff of Richardson's usual damsel in distress schtick. Ms. Jhabvala was left to make something out of this debacle. She wrote the screenplay as if the complete play existed and pictures two rival theatrical impresarios angling to get funding for a production. One is a theatrical veteran named Lilliana and played by Anne Baxter who represents a traditional and crowd pleasing approach. The other, named Pierre and played by Robert Powell, is an avant-garde guru who prefers an edgier aesthetic. 

Pierre closets his troupe from the outside world. They all live and rehearse together in a polyamorous commune. The members of the troupe all have outside jobs, but they give the money they earn to Pierre, as they would to a pimp. Pierre and Lilliana have a shared history which we glimpse in ineffective flashbacks. Baxter and Powell have zilch in the way of chemistry. Pierre is supposed to have a whiff of satanic decadence about him, one character refers to a cloven hoof, but Powell just seems distant and batty. The ideal actor for the role would have been Peter O' Toole who brought a lot of Lucifer to the role of a film director in 1980's The Stunt Man. Baxter fares a little better in this her last film, but I can't forgive the hideous outfits she has to wear and the indignity of her doing a scene in curlers. New York is accurately depicted as a pretty gritty place to live at the time, but the costumes are all at least five years out of date. The no wave New York of the time doesn't exist in this movie except for a Ramones sticker on a door.

The other primary relationship in the movie, besides Pierre and Lilliana, is between Victor (Kurt Johnson), a young song and dance man, and his wife, untested actress Ariadne (Sean Young). Ariadne is enmeshed in Pierre's cult, drawing the romantic attentions of both Pierre and a folk singer named Katya (Katrina Hodiak). Victor is having onstage success in a frothy musical, but is understandably miffed at Ariadne's estrangement from him. There is a little hint that the film is trying to link this strand of the plot with the rake's abduction of the heroine in the play, but it is half-assed and unconvincing. Mr. Johnson is great when shown rehearsing musical numbers, but is instant Sominex in the dramatic scenes. It is fun to Sean Young, in her first screen role, before she became a botoxed replicant. Her inexperience seems charming rather than awkward and true to the character. Ms. Hodiak, daughter of Ms. Baxter and John Hodiak, is cursed with an under-written character. However, she is solely responsible for the god awful folk songs she performs which tend to bring whatever momentum the movie is accumulating to a screeching halt.

The folk singer character also seems to emanate from a 1960s time warp that did not exist in 1980 New York except in Ruth Jhabvala's mind. I feel that the dichotomy she was drawing between mainstream and experimental theater was out of date by then. Come to think of it, when we do see Pierre's production it is very reminiscent of Peter Brook's late 1960s extravaganzas: particularly Marat/Sade and A Midsummer's Night Dream. Ms. Jhabvala's screenplay tries to gives us the feel of an ensemble in production, as in Jacques Rivette's masterpiece Out 1, but bites off more than she can chew. Another romantic duo of Nancy New (pleasant) and Tim Choate (outstanding) is one too many. What attempts to be a rich and multi-dimensional film ends up being over-stuffed. 

There are some interesting aspects to the film, though. Richard Robbins not only had to compose a traditional score, but a faux opera number or two for Lilliana's show. The result, which sounds like a mash-up of The Abduction from the Seraglio and The Beggar's Opera, is effective and piquant. Despite Jane Austen in Manhattan's threadbare and shambolic nature, Merchant Ivory productions were always on the verge of collapsing, James Ivory's direction shows signs of growth. When Pierre and Ariadne visit a Sufi service in their building, Ivory pulls his camera back to show the whole room reverberating with music and rhythmic dance. He is striving to capture the religious fervor and union of the group. When he uses this technique later in his career, usually in English manor house, it is often to show the gulf between characters in cavernous rooms.

Another moment I enjoyed was a monologue by Michael Wager playing George, a guileless fat cat whom Lilliana is hitting up for backing. In his luxe penthouse, George recounts a Sisyphean tales from his childhood about an older bully repeatedly smashing George's sand castles. A winning moment from Mr. Wager that Ivory helps along with his placement of the Empire State Building in the background. The message, like that of Shelley's Ozymandias, is billboarded for us: all our vain efforts will be washed away by the sands of time. A few more moments like these and I might have considered Jane Austen in Manhattan to be a good film. 

Side Street

Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell

Anthony Mann's Side Street, released in 1949, is a solid if unspectacular noir, the director's last film in that genre. Sydney Boehm's script has postal worker Farley Granger filching some ill-gotten gains from the filing cabinet of a crooked attorney. Soon, he is a man on the run around Manhattan, sought by the mob and the police. Cathy O'Donnell, reuniting with Granger after the critical success of They Live By Night, plays his pregnant wife. Since her character has a baby during the course of the film and Granger is otherwise engaged, they hardly have any onscreen time together. Ms. O'Donnell gets to employ her patented luminous masochism as her character worries herself sick about her beleaguered spouse. The vulnerability of Granger's character is a good fit for his limited talents. Hitchcock would seize upon the vulnerability locked within Granger's stiff pretty boy routine in Strangers on a Train. The only time Granger gets to act butch in Side Street is when he bullies bank clerk Whit Bissell, who whimpers convincingly.

The supporting cast is more interesting than the leads in this flick. Paul Kelly narrates the film and ably portrays a homicide chief. The narration hammers home Boehm's theme, that a deterministic world where mammon is king can deviate any man from the path of righteousness. The visuals render the narration somewhat redundant. James Craig is properly cold and menacing as an unrepentant thug. Paul Harvey, Edmon Ryan, Charles McGraw, and Adele Jergens all offer memorable vignettes. The most exciting performance is by Jean Hagen (Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain) who portrays a third rate lounge singer and gangster's moll. Granger's character is pretending to cotton to her in order to find out info, but it is Hagen who steals the scene in a grandly larcenous manner.

Jean Hagen

Mann's direction is assured from the get go. His low angle shots in the shady lawyer office, making James Craig look even more looming, immediately establishes a corrupt and foreboding environment. Cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg (The Philadelphia Story, Gigi) doesn't use expressionistic shafts of light like John Alton, but his framing of dark tenements and Greenwich Village at night are striking all the same. I found Lennie Hayton's score to be forgettable, but the art direction by Cedric Gibbons and Daniel Cathcart to be exemplary. The trompe l'œil look of Adele Jergens pad gives us such a sense of faux domesticity, hipping the audience that a scam is being perpetuated. The end of Side Street, a frantic car chase across location in Manhattan, points to Mann's future in outdoor action films such as his many Westerns with Jimmy Stewart. Side Street displays that he was just as adept indoors.

Alice et Martin

Juliette Binoche and Alexis Loret

André Téchiné's Alice et Martin is a 1998 romantic melodrama that, as with many Téchiné films, has a backdrop of family trauma. Alexis Loret plays Martin, an illegitimate issue of a cold and cruel father (an effective Pierre Maguelon). Martin had gone to live with his father at age ten and was devastated at being separated from his beloved mother (an ineffective Carmen Maura). After his father's death, Martin wanders the countryside like a vagabond until he is incarcerated for petty theft. Afterwards, he takes shelter at the Paris apartment of his step-brother Benjamin (Mathieu Amalric). Benjamin is gay and a struggling actor who shares his flat with an unsuccessful violinist named Alice (Juliette Binoche). Martin falls for Alice and begins stalking her. He also has a meteoric rise as a fashion model which he regards ambivalently. Alice, initially put off by Martin's creepy manner of courtship, eventually fall for the lug.

Alice and Martin take off for a romantic sojourn in Spain. There, Alice tells Martin that she is pregnant. He is flummoxed by the news and seems unable or unwilling to plan for the future. In a long flashback, we learn of his culpability in his father's death. Martin feels that he must make amends for his crime. Despite the opposition of his father's wife, Martin confesses to his crime and goes to jail. We see the very pregnant Alice struggling to make ends meets as a wedding musician. She vows to wait for Martin until he is sprung.

Martin's contrition is supposed to be an act of repentance that results in a just verdict and peace of mind for the troubled youth; like Raskolnikov's confession in Crime and Punishment.  Unfortunately, Alexis Loret's blank performance muddles that effect. Martin is only twenty, so he is a bit of a tabula rasa, but he is also supposed to be suffering from mental health issues. Loret was in fact a model that Téchiné plucked from obscurity for the role, so it is not a surprise that he could not summon a performance that outlines the darker shades of his character. Still, this throws the emotional payoff of the picture out of whack. Loret cannot help look like a bit an amateur compared to Binoche and Amalric, two pillars of French cinema who are at the top of their game here.

Téchiné's script, written with Olivier Assayas and Gilles Taurand, is incisive and gives some indelible monologues to both Binoche and Amalric. However, as in his best films (Ma saison préférée, Wild Reeds, and Thieves), Téchiné proves himself to be better at conception than execution. He is a much more skillful writer than director. He is adept enough at interior drama, but flails at exteriors and scenes of action. His outdoor tracking shots add nothings to the dialogue. The filming of Martin's father's death is an almost complete botch. Flaws like these prevent Alice et Martin from attaining the greatness hinted at by its best performance. Instead, it is an effective, if downbeat, soap opera.

Canoa: A Shameful Memory

Enrique Lucero

Felipe Cazals' Canoa: A Shameful Memory, from 1976, is a memorable drama recounting the massacre of a group of young hikers by an irate mob in the small village of San Miguel Canoa in southern Mexico in 1968. The villagers had been egged on by the local priest who took advantage of the then current demonstrations on Mexico's university campuses to agitate the villagers against outsiders. The priest, in his sermons, had decried the unrest on campuses as the work of communist agitators. The populace were eager to strike back at those who they thought were undermining their traditional values and religion. It is important to note that a great deal of the popular uprisings in rural Central and South America in the 19th and 20th centuries, like the War of Canudos in Brazil, were reactionary in nature, instigated to defend mother church and traditional values perceived to be under siege. 

The movie is filmed in a faux documentary style with characters addressing the camera directly in an informal manner. Primarily this is through Salvador Sánchez who drolly plays a character generically named a witness. It is to Cazals' credit that Sánchez's character turns out to be a most unreliable narrator whose allegiances are shifty. This adds another dimension to the film and helps flesh out its portrait of the rural community. Cazals also adds elements from sources outside of the documentary genre, including the influence of Mexican muralists, balladeers, and Pop Art. This ensures that Canoa... lives and breathes a little more than traditional leftist agitprop.

The film's most obvious flaw is its depictions of the victims who are bland stick figures. The villains are much more indelibly etched, particularly Enrique Lucero's priest. The priest is portrayed as a fascistic strong man coldly manipulating the populace. The priest is so chilly he even wears sun glasses during mass. Lucero is perfectly cast, calling to mind his performance as Death in Roberto Gavaldón's masterpiece Macario. Cazals also utilizes traces of the horror genre, particularly the shots of torch bearing villagers bent on destruction which invokes the legacy of James Whale's Frankenstein. This last element had an impact on the work of Guillermo del Toro who has acknowledged his debt to Cazals.

Scream of Fear

Susan Strasberg and Ann Todd

Seth Holt's Scream of Fear, first released under the title Taste of Fear in 1961, is an under sung mystery thriller. The film was a Hammer Production, but stops a little short of being a horror film. There is no supernatural aspect to the movie, just human skullduggery. The script by the Welshman Jimmy Sangster, who had a hand in most of the Hammer films of this period, is a rehash of mystery tropes in which allegiances and even identities shift. The set-up, an heiress (Susan Strasberg) in a wheelchair stuck in a cliffside villa on the Cote d'Azur with a possible evil step-mother, is a low budget variation on Rear Window, with a little Gaslight thrown into the mix, and Holt's usage of stuffed animals indicates that Psycho was lingering in his mind.

Still, the film rises above its premise through the gorgeous lens of Roger Slocum whose varied credits include Kind Hearts and Coronets, The  Servant, The Fearless Vampire Killers, Travels With My Aunt and Raiders of the Lost Ark. In toto, his life work exists as an impressive and eclectic body. On Scream of Fear, Slocum is able to elevate the cheap set into a believable space where peril resides. Holt has Slocum shoots most of the drawing room scenes with one character in foreground and the other players positioned diagonally in the mid-distance. Effective ratcheting of suspense or boring neo-Expressionist portentousness? Opinions differ. In the Village Voice, Jonas Mekas gave it the back of his hand calling the film "bad in every way." Christopher Lee, who appears in the film as a sinister seeming French Doctor, thought it was the best film Hammer ever made.

Ann Todd and Christopher Lee

I lean more to Mr. Lee's point of view, but know that Scream of Fear's charms are minor. It does not try to reinvent the cinema or the Gothic Mystery genre. However, did Ann Todd or Susan Strasberg ever give better performances? I think not. Ms. Strasberg's character is a perfect fit for her fidgety neuroticism, but Mr. Holt deserves some credit for all the performances. Mr. Lee is in fine form, as are Ronald Lewis and Fred Johnson, though I hope the latter wasn't paid by the word. Part of the reason there never was much of Seth Holt cult was that he died far too young, at age 47 in 1971. I am not sure he ever would have risen too far above the slough of B pictures he was assigned, but his best pictures, Scream of Fear and Station Six-Sahara, are stealthily rewarding. 

Letter of Introduction

George Murphy and Andrea Leeds

John Stahl's Letter of Introduction is a 1938 Universal Studios concoction that, though constructed with disparate elements, manages to be a satisfying picture thanks to its highly competent cast and sensitive direction. The picture manages to be charming, humorous, and heart warming. The latter I found to be surprising since I am an old crocodile, but John Stahl pictures, like those of his contemporary Frank Borzage, have that effect. The picture is hard to categorize. I would call it a romantic melodrama with comic episodes. The melodrama part of the picture casts Andrea Leeds, fresh off an Oscar nominated supporting role in Stage Door, as Kay Martin, an aspiring actress living in a tenement in New York City. Her titular letter reveals that she is the bastard spawn of John Mannering (Adolphe Menjou), a topline actor and scion of an American theatrical family who is well-known as a serial philanderer. Mannering is also an alcoholic, so, essentially, the character is a thinly veiled portrait of John Barrymore.

Though Mannering acknowledges his daughter, neither choses to publicly divulge their relationship. This provides romantic complications for the both of them, since Kay is being pursued by a dancer (George Murphy) and Mannering is engaged to the comely and young Lydia (Ann Sheridan). The comic bits are shoehorned into the picture and feature ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Tolerance for Bergen's schtick is a matter of personal taste. However, his routines are, under the circumstances, reasonably well integrated into the plot. McCarthy serves as an uncontrollable id who ejaculates what is not normally said in polite society. Mercifully, Bergen's other dummy, the moronic Mortimer Snerd, makes only a brief appearance.

Another aspect of Letter of Introduction that give it a patched together, Frankenstein's monster feel, is that it is a regurgitation of 1937's Stage Door. Menjou and Leeds were in both films, as was the always welcome Eve Arden. Over ten screenwriters labored on this picture and, at least, they managed to give it some amusing showbiz repartee. Ms. Arden is especially sharp with her Gotham patter. Murphy is good, a lightweight talent in a bantamweight role, and gets too to show off his dance moves. Ms. Sheridan gets only one moment of oomph, but it's a doozy as she spies what she think is a cheating lover across a nightclub dance floor. Stahl is very precise at his placement of actors within the frame, letting all his players show their characters' emotions in pantomime. 

A Venn diagram between Adolph Menjou and John Barrymore would show many shared traits. Masterful thesps, they could both toss off a grand theatrical manner (hence the name John Mannering) that often crossed the border into ham. What Menjou lacks is Barrymore's sex appeal which Barrymore himself had lacked after checking into the Hotel California aka Cirrhosis by the Sea. No matter, the role calls for the actor to be more paternal than lecherous and Menjou is very good. As is the relatively forgotten Andrea Leeds who ditched Hollywood after marrying the heir to a horse breeding fortune in 1939. She seems especially adept at sincerity, often a bane for actresses. Memorable character bits are offered by Rita Johnson, Ernest Cossart, Frank Jenks, Jonathan Hale, and George Davis.

Letter of Introduction has been in the public domain since the late 1960s. Most copies are dodgy, the print showing on Tubi is quite poor. This is a shame since the cinematographer on Letter of Introduction was Karl Freund, one of the finest cinematographers of all time and a frequent collaborator of Stahl. I'd recommend the DVD released by oldies.com. 

September 5

Peter Sarsgaard

I was not particularly looking forward to September 5, a film from Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum, having watched on television the events it depicts in real time. It was a horrific event that I didn't especially want to revisit, but this is a worthy, if unspectacular movie. The event I refer to, for you youngsters, occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Athletes and coaches from the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage by members of the Black September terrorist group. The debacle ended with both terrorists and hostages dead. September 5 views these events through the prism of ABC's live coverage. The action of the film is set primarily within the ABC production booth as rookie director Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) juggles live shots and studio chatter during the coverage. 

In 1972, ABC was the most junior and least respected of the three major American television networks. One distinguishing feature of the network was its coverage of sports, particularly The Wide World of Sports, a mainstay of my childhood viewing. The show featured a potpourri of sporting events filmed on videotape, everything from cliff diving in Acapulco to demolition derbies in Islip, New York. The host of the show, Jim McKay, and the executive responsible for it, Roone Arledge, garnered great acclaim and were heading ABC's exclusive (in America) coverage of the 1972 Summer Olympics. Arledge, a hard charging business tyro is played by Peter Sarsgaard. Sarsgaard is not as rotund as Arledge was, even with padding, but aptly captures his cutthroat nature. Arledge, who had boots on the ground, was able to prevent ABC News from wresting control of the coverage from him. He and McKay were eventually able to win nearly every possible plaudit for their work in Munich. This catapulted Arledge, ironically, into being named head of ABC News, an extremely unlikely perch for a figure from televised sports.

The acting in September 5 is uniformly good, in addition to Messrs. Sarsgaard and Magaro, Ben Chaplin and Leonie Benesch are also first rate. That said, September 5 sacrifices characterization for a You Are There immediacy. The interpersonal conflicts end up seeming wan. Also, every time the flick addresses the Holocaust or German guilt, the effect is both trite and portentous. However, the film triumphs in its picturing of ABC's utilization of the crude technology of the analog era. One choice made by Mr. Fehlbaum and his cohorts works in the picture's favor above all others. Most of ABC's name performers are portrayed by actors, like Benjamin Walker's Peter Jennings, or a voice actor for Howard Cosell. However, the makers of this film wisely chose to retain the archival footage of anchor Jim McKay and not use a thesp. McKay's commentary, especially his announcement of the tragic end of the crisis, are indelible to those who were alive at the time and could not be equaled by any actor.      

Night Call

Jonathan Feltre

Michiel Blanchart's Night Call, the Belgian filmmaker's first feature, is a solid and promising thriller. The film is a Hitchcockian man on the run flick that has lead Jonathan Feltre ripping around Brussels pursued by both gangsters and the police. Feltre plays Mady, a locksmith whose titular job helping out a young woman claiming to be locked out of her apartment leads him into mortal danger. The femme, named Claire (Natacha Krief), turns out not to live there and is using Mady to filch a bag of cash (the film's MacGuffin). Mady is soon a wanted man and leads the viewer on a nocturnal and murky prowl of Brussels' brothels, nightclubs, and gangster lairs. He even gets caught up and uses to his advantage a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

Some critics have criticized the film for a facile use of the Black Lives Matter issue, but I think a genre film like this is not really the format for a full investigation of such weighty themes. Night Call deftly integrates the issue within its somewhat formulaic framework. Night Call does show police brutality, but the world Blanchart and co-scenarist Gilles Marchand (Harry He's Here to Help, Who Killed Bambi?) have conjured is a chaotic urban landscape in which combatants are engaged in a survival of the fittest. Not for nothing is the film bracketed by two close-ups of wary German Shepherds. Being a locksmith, Mady has more survival tools than most at his disposal. There are few, if any, false notes by the cast. My favorite performance was by Jonas Bloquet as a thug with secrets. The film portrays its characters not as archetypes of hero and villain, but in shades of grey. Not an earthshaking movie by any means, Night Call holds out the hope for more expansive and personal films from Mr. Blanchart. 

Silent Light

                    
Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light, from 2007, is a deliberately slow peek at a love triangle in a Mennonite community in Mexico. Stolid farmer Johan has six children and a good relationship with his wife Esther, but has baffled himself by falling in love with another member of their community named Marianne. This domestic crisis is handled with equanimity by all concerned, even Johan's preacher father. Johan questions whether his love for Marianne is part of God's design or a temptation instigated by Satanic forces. The slow pace of the film mirrors how the members of the community live, not within the frantic pace of modern life, but in tune with the rhythms of the natural universe.

We are not treated to the history of the affair, but are plunged into the film midstream. The film is bracketed by five minute tracks into a sunrise and and a sunset. The characters of Silent Light are grains of sand within a unfathomable cosmos, but are able to discern traces of divine grace within the vastness of nature. The film has moments of great beauty, but feels, at times, too calculated. There are precious few moments of spontaneity in Silent Light. The flick feels too much like a calculated mashup of Days of Heaven (adultery on the plains) and Ordet (God's benevolence touching all). Certainly, the miracle that ends the film on a grace note did not cause this non-believer to quake with the impact of a revelation. 

28 Years Later

Alfie Williams and Ralph Fiennes

28 Years Later is not an afterthought or a superfluous sequel, but the best film thus far in the zombie franchise. Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland, now an auteur in his own right, are back with the franchise after skipping 2007's 28 Weeks Later. The new film has the same back story, a virus has contaminated the UK turning those infected into zombies, but with new characters and a more rural setting. We are introduced to a community on the tidal island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland. The isle has a causeway that links it to the mainland at low tide. The islanders, thus, have to man fortifications to keep the zombies off the island. The main characters are a stoic father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), his deathly ill wife (Jodie Comer), and their twelve year old son, Spike (Alfie Williams).

The islanders are shown to be on a war footing, focused on tasks that will ensure survival and stave off the zombies. Because of the breakdown of modern society and conveniences in the UK, the lifestyle of the islanders has regressed to that of the Medieval era. Bows and arrows not guns are the weapons now. Boyle and Garland interweave their portrait of the islanders with footage of a martial England through the ages: not only newsreel shots of civilian preparedness for World Wars 1 and 2, but shots of Laurence Olivier as Henry V commanding his archers against the French. This conveys that the resolve of the islanders is similar to that of their forebears, but also that violence is as English as mince pie.

The first act of the film revolves around a journey to the mainland that Spike must endure as a rite of manhood. His Dad travels with Spike to assist him in his first kill of a zombie. As in all cultures, youth must steel themselves in order to survive the travails of adulthood. Unfortunately, this proves to be decidedly more unpleasant and dangerous than a visit to the DMV. Spike and his father survive the trip and are feted by the islanders. Acclaimed as a hero, Spike is uneasy. He feels he did not behave heroically or even competently. He has not the maturity or wisdom to know yet that society lies for its own sake. Heroes, particularly war heroes, receive adulation because society would rather not contemplate the barbarity that ensures its society. Society would rather embroider a heroic legend than face the truth.

Ralph Fiennes and Jodie Comer

Spike is further disillusioned when he spies his father hooking up with a comely maiden. Enraged, he bolts from the island with his addled mother in tow. He has heard about the presence of a mysterious physician on the mainland who he hopes will cure his mother. Thus begins a hero's journey egged on by Oedipal resentment. Over the course of his journey, Spike will meet three father figures (Edvin Ryding, Ralph Fiennes, and Jack O'Connell) who will each add to Spike's maturation and knowledge of the world. Boyle handles his cast adroitly and films the action thrillingly. Garland's script expertly alternates sequences of action with moments of contemplation. The score by Scottish group Young Fathers is hauntingly appropriate. I'm ready for the sequel.

                    

Best Films of 2024

                  

 1)     La Chimera                                     Alice Rohrwacher

 2)     Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell     Pham Thien An

 3)     Love Lies Bleeding                         Rose Glass

 4)     La Bête                                            Bertrand Bonello

 5)     About Dry Grasses                         Nuri Bilge Ceylan

 6)     The Apprentice                               Ali Abbasi

 7)     Anora                                               Sean Baker

 8)     Yannick                                            Quentin Dupieux

 9)     Les chambres rouges                      Pascal Plante

10)    The People's Joker                          Vera Drew

     

Films I Enjoyed

The Count of Monte Cristo,

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,

Kinds of Kindness, The Sympathizer.

Juror #2, Rapito,

Furiosa, Tótem,

Late Night with the Devil, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In,

In the Land of Saints and Sinners, The Substance,

Nobody Wants This, Hundreds of Beavers, 

Kneecap, Janet Planet,

Presence,

A Complete Unknown, Merchant Ivory, 

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person,

Soundtrack to a Coup d'état, The Brutalist,

Oh, Canada, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, 

Origin, The Settlers,

Martha, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,

Between the Temples, Bird, 

Abigail, The Penguin,

The Hit Man, Ripley,

Kalki 2898 AD, Megalopolis,

The Room Next Door, September 5,

Green Border, I'm Still Here,

The Promised Land, Sasquatch Summer,

I Saw the TV Glow, Society of the Snow, 

Monkey Man, Evil Does Not Exist,

A Family Affair, Snack Shack, 

Challengers, Drive Away Dolls,

Flow, Heretic,

The Fall Guy, Oddity,

Dune 2, Saturday Night,

In a Violent Nature, A Real Pain,

His Three Daughters, Dahomey,

The First Omen, How to Have Sex,

Trap, Twisters,

Carved, Wicked,

Below the Mendoza Line

Only the River Flows, MaXXXine,

The Coffee Table, Better Man,

Fast Charlie,

The Order, Rebel Ridge. 

What You Wish For, Last Summer, 

Things Will Be Different, Queer, 

The Old Oak, Carry-On,

Rumours, Nosferatu,

Blink Twice, The Falling Star, 

Conclave, Longlegs, 

Nowhere Special, The Dead Don't Hurt,

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Street Trash,

The Thicket, A Quiet Place: Day One,

Lisa Frankenstein, Emilia Pérez,

Festival of the Living Dead, Lowlifes,

Civil War, Joker: Folie à Deux,

The Bikeriders, Witches,

Babes, Cuckoo,

100 Yards,

Gladiator 2,  Babygirl, 

Gasoline Rainbow, Daddio,

Jackpot, Road House,

Madame Web, Alien: Romulus,

Scoop, The Beekeeper,

Poolman, Unfrosted,

Immaculate, Trigger Warning

Not Seen

All We Imagine As Light, Nickel Boys,

The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Christmas at Miller's Point,

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, My Old Ass,

Small Things Like These, The Sparrows in the Chimney...

                                      

Through the Back Door

Mary Pickford

Through the Back Door is an above average Mary Pickford vehicle released by United Artists in 1921. The film is credited to the directing team of Alfred E. Green and Jack Pickford, Mary's doomed brother. Green had previously directed Jack in a number of light comic features for the Goldwyn company. Most reports from the set of this film indicate that Jack Pickford's input was minimal. His sister was trying to throw him a bone after the mysterious death of Jack's wife, Olive Thomas, in Paris the previous year. The resultant scandal, a truly sordid and byzantine one, greatly affected the addictive Jack and tarnished his sunny, All-American image. His career never recovered and he slid towards oblivion and an early death. Mary Pickford, in her memoir, characterized Jack and Olive as "children".

Through the Back Door intersects not at all with this sad tale, it alternates between treacle and goofiness. Our Mary plays Jeanne, a Belgian waif abandoned by her mother whose American husband wants his new bride all to himself. Mom sails to America while Jeanne is left in the care of a trusted servant. That servant becomes overly attached to Jeanne and thwarts a reunion with her mother. A few years later, World War 1 intervenes and Jeanne is sent packing to find her mother, who thinks Jeanne is mort. En route, Jeanne takes two war orphans under her wing, one of whom is Peaches Jackson in drag. Whew. Jeanne ends up working as a maid in her grieving mother's house where she is able to expose two grifters, one of whom is Adolphe Menjou, and, at last, reunite her family.

The film caters to Pickford's core audience desire to see her play a scampish pre-pubescent. This is anathema to audiences today, but the more I see of her performances the more I appreciate Pickford's singular talents. The wacky humor of Pickford's tangle with an obdurate mule and her skating routine with brushes are a welcome respite from the hollow contrivances of the melodrama. Green's direction at his best, say Baby Face, is merely amiable, but Through the Back Door boasts impressive cinematography from Charles Rosher (um, Sunrise) and inventive art direction by Stephen Goosson. On the follow up to this film, Little Lord Fauntleroy, which had the same collaborators, Goosson would use similarly oversize sets to help give the illusion that his diminutive star was playing a youngster. Currently streaming in a good print on Tubi.