Ladies of Leisure

Barbara Stanwyck, Pre-Code

Frank Capra's Ladies of Leisure is an above average early talkie, a romantic melodrama that gave impetus to the career of its leading lady, Barbara Stanwyck, at Columbia Pictures. The picture was adapted from a David Belasco play that opened in 1924. Ladies of Leisure was one of many stage scripts that were converted to film at the start of the sound era. Screenwriter Jo Swerling did his best to wipe away some of the cobwebs, but what remains smacks of the contrivances of a previous era. Luggish film veteran Ralph Graves plays a wealthy painter named Jerry Strong. Strong has forsaken his father's railroad dynasty to pursue his muse. Graves at no times resembles a painter, but proves to be a suitably hulking masculine presence to contrast with the petite Stanwyck, an avatar of downtrodden femininity.

The picture proper begins with a wild party at Strong's penthouse. Drunken revelers are thoughtlessly chucking bottles which smash on the pavement below narrowly missing pedestrians. Capra here, and later, uses miniatures to apt effect. The opening accurately reflects the mood of Capra's country in 1930. The effects of the Crash were now being felt in earnest. There was a backlash to, what was then felt were, the wild excesses of the roaring 20s. A return to traditional and homespun values was in process. In part, this led to the institution of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934. Strong is so disgusted by the actions of his guests that he storms out of his own party to prowl the waterfront in search of his muse. This he finds her, Stanwyck introduced in a leggy long shot.

Stanwyck is playing Kay Arnold, a party girl who has just departed a swank affair on a yacht by borrowing a rowboat. Strong gives her a ride home and asks if she will model for him. She is surprised, impressed, but eventually miffed when he does not try to take advantage of the situation. She admires his values and falls in love with Strong when he shows her an elevated view of life. The formula is the familiar Victorian one of the fallen woman who finds redemption. At one point, Arnold is called a "gold miner", a precursor to the "gold diggers" derided by Dean Martin and Kanye West and countless other rapscallions. On their first film together, Capra had a tough time adjusting to Stanwyck's style. She tended to giver her all on the first take with little remaining for subsequent takes. What remains onscreen are explosions of masochistic hysteria, what would become Stanwyck's trademark. Her fierce energy redeems a trite role and holds this picture together.

The supporting cast is fully able to inhabit the stereotypical roles. The doomed Marie Prevost is a delight as Kay's best buddy and roommate. The jokes about Prevost's character's weight have not stood the test of time. Lowell Sherman is perfectly cast as Strong's best bud, a pixilated playboy. Nance O'Neal and George Fawcett are both memorable as Strong' understanding mother and obdurate father. However, what lifts the film above the ordinary, besides Ms. Stanwyck, is the energy and craft of Capra. He was very far from the placid and corny director of his late maturity. He doesn't attempt to open up the sections of the film that are taken from the play, but has his camera prowl the limits of the interiors. This establishes the sets as lived in spaces that both define and limit the characters who inhabit them. Capra dollies back numerous times from his urban apartment dwellers to emphasize their confinement. Contrapuntal pans delineate the apartments of both Kay and Jerry and the social chasm that separates them. Ladies of Leisure ends in a flurry of cross-cutting that is as kinetic and exciting as anything Capra produced during his long career.

 

The Phoenician Scheme

Benicio Del Toro and Mia Threapleton 

Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme is his most tiresome flick since The Darjeeling Limited. Set in the 1950s, the film is replete with the visual touches that always make Anderson's films watchable. However, the central story, in which an aging and beleaguered business titan (Benicio Del Toro) forsakes his pursuit of lucre to in order to bond with his family, is a flimsy excuse for a road movie. Del Toro's character, monikered Anatole "Zsa-Zsa" Korda must drum up funding for his latest financial flim flam, the titular scheme. In tow are his daughter (a habited Mia Threapleton) and a nebbish (Michael Cera) who is not what he seems. They fly from point to point meeting up with big name stars (Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch) stuck in one dimensional roles. Hanks wields a Coke bottle to underline the fact that his character is an American while Bryan Cranston brandishes a Hershey bar. Most of the supporting players are wasted, but I did enjoy Richard Ayode as a revolutionary leader and Bill Murray as God.

God shows up in black and white dream sequences that haunt Korda and hammer into his, and the viewer's, head his disconnection with his family. The plot is so low stakes that the film feels twee and overly Apollonian, Wes Anderson's Achilles heel. Given the way the decor in Korda's private planes changes, the film should have been called The Color Scheme. The picture feels overly thought over and hermetic. Korda is supposed to be a flamboyant and grandiose persona, but Del Toro is miscast because he is better at burrowing into his character's depths rather than puffing up a character's pretensions. Threapleton seems promising, but her character is locked in deadpan mode. I don't think she blinked the entire film. Cera is redundant in a Wes Anderson film: twee on twee. What is lacking are moments like those in Anderson's oeuvre that have a smack of reality: Owen Wilson looking wistful in prison garb in Bottle Rocket, Brian Cox berating Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore or Saoirse Ronan smiling at her beloved in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Phoenician Scheme is handsomely appointed and diverting with, on paper, a fabulous cast, but it is devoid of such memorable moments. 

The Best of Claudia Cardinale

1938 - 2025

                    Marriage functions best when both partners remain somewhat unmarried

     1)     Once Upon A Time in the West               Sergio Leone           1969

    2)     Sandra                                                   Luchino Visconti          1965

    3)     Rocco and His Brothers                      Luchino Visconti          1960

    4)     The Adventures of Gerard                Jerzy Skolimowski         1970

    5)     Don't Make Waves                      Alexander Mackendrick        1966

    6)     The Leopard                                         Luchino Visconti          1963

    7)     The Professionals                                  Richard Brooks         1966

    8)     8 1/2                                                        Federico Fellini          1963

    9)     Big Deal on Madonna Street               Mario Moricelli            1958

   10)    The Pink Panther                                 Blake Edwards            1963

There used to be a cafe on NW 12th in Portland that I would stroll past from time to time. Visible from the street in the cafe was a huge black and white photograph of Ms. Cardinale having a pleasant chat with Bryan Ferry at a nightclub in the late 1970s. It seemed the essence of glamor.

Nearly all of her appearances in films after 1970 are not worth seeking out. Fitzicarraldo is one of the few exceptions. Nevertheless, her golden decade, which commenced with her eye catching role in Big Deal on Madonna Street, is startling in its range. She was as much at ease in silly farces as she was in stoic action films or costume dramas. The Adventures of Gerard and Don't Make Waves are inferior films to The Leopard and 8 1/2, but they displayed her talents better. No matter what the genre, she always brought warmth and playful sensuality to the proceedings.

Ms. Cardinale and Frank Zappa

Fugitive Road

Wera Engels and Erich von Stroheim

Frank R. Strayer's Fugitive Road is an independent B production from 1934, a romantic drama with comic elements. The film was made for peanuts on the Universal lot and was released by Chesterfield Pictures during its waning days. The company would soon be taken over by Herbert Yates along with other poverty row studios and merged into Republic Pictures. The film is set in an Austrian town on the Italian border. Presiding over the border is Captain Hauptmann Oswald von Traunsee (Stroheim), a career soldier who has been exiled to this Podunk town because of an affair he had with a Minister's wife. Traunsee lords over his small command and still indulges his roving eye. We see him nab a band of diamond smugglers and shepherd a group of emigres into a boarding house where they await processing. Among them are the two other points of the romantic triangle of the film : a Russian peasant girl (Wera Engels) and an American gangster (Leslie Fenton) who is on the lam. 

It turns out the gangster knew the Russian gal's brother in America. Unbeknownst to her, he died in a fracas and the gangster wants to make amends by marrying her and taking her to the States, even if it means turning himself into the authorities. Stroheim's character, in full vile Teutonic seducer mode, stands in their way. Yet, his character morphs into George Arliss, who was forever uniting star-crossed lovers in his pictures, two thirds of the way through this very short flick and works for a happy ending for his youthful charges. There is not much else to the picture except for some excruciating ethnic humor. The Italian patriarch smells like garlic! Oy!

The spare and cramped sets do provide a fitting sense of enclosure for a tale of confined immigrants. Director Strayer, most famous for directing twelve films in the Blondie series, was a journeyman B director who amassed over 80 credits. There is some notion that von Stroheim directed parts of the picture. Tubi lists him as co-director. Certainly, the scenes where von Stroheim drills and berates his regiment in his native tongue smack of his oeuvre. However, much of the film does not. There are two fairly effective dolly shots, a technique the Austrian born master avoided. In general, the direction is workmanlike and unmemorable. I sense the high percentage of Deutsche spoken is because this film was targeted to show in urban independent theaters in cities with an enclave of German immigrants, like my hometown of Baltimore. The film's view of Austria is pleasant and positive. The Italian patriarch and his large family are welcomed with open arms by the Austrians once the matriarch delivers a son in the boarding house. Soon, Austria and Germany would be less welcoming to immigrants, but there is no sense of doom at the rise of the Third Reich. There would be no glimmer in American films of the coming danger until Three Comrades in 1938. Before then, American films held out laurels of peace and compassion, the odd evil Hun aside,  to our World War 1 adversaries: see for example All Quiet on the Western Front, Four Sons, and Little Man, What Now.

Ms. Engels, a native of Kiel was appealing, but bland. She had no onscreen zing. Her attire doesn't help for she is made to look like a doll. She was out of pictures by 1937. Leslie Fenton fares better, he spars well with Stroheim, but is too soft to be a gangster. He was married at the time to Ann Dvorak and served honorably in World War 2. He directed a few minor Westerns after the war. The primary reason to see Fugitive Road is Herr Stroheim. He is his usual tyrannical self, but there is a winning sense of mischief in his acting as if he was truly tired of playing evil Huns. He is already eyeing his next conquest as the film ends. On with the show! There is a slight pre-Code feel to the film, with shots of a washer woman's rump and a men's room. Unfortunately, the print of Fugitive Road streaming on Tubi is atrocious.              

The Flame of New Orleans

              

René Clair's The Flame of New Orleans is an occasionally engaging piece of fluff from 1941. The project was a major production for Universal Pictures, an attempt to craft a vehicle for Marlene Dietrich after she experienced a career revival with Destry Rides Again and Seven Sinners. Dietrich portrays a newcomer to New Orleans sometime in the mid 19th century who draws the romantic attentions of an effete aristocrat played by Roland Young and a roughhewn sea captain played by Bruce Cabot. Guess who gets the girl. Cabot is a fine actor, but has little chemistry with Dietrich in a part, a man's man role, that cries out for Clark Gable or John Wayne. The electricity that Dietrich has with Wayne in Seven Sinners and The Spoilers is absent. All in all, The Flame of New Orleans was a troubled production. Dietrich did not like Cabot and thought he was poorly prepared. She thought even less of Clair, a feeling that was shared by the crew during the production.

The film feels truncated at 79 minutes. Trouble with the censors, a not unusual problem for a Dietrich picture, resulted in the elision of several sequences. Dietrich gets to sing an anodyne parlor ballad for Young and his swell pals, but a sequence in a rowdy cafe, which cries out for a ballsy number by the diva, fails to provide that showstopper. The screenplay by Norman Krasna is a patchy affair. Some of the plot devices he concocts, such as Cabot's pet monkey getting entangled with Dietrich's carriage, seem hoary. There is japery about gout. The device of Dietrich pretending to have an identical cousin, the naughty one of course, is also trite and silly. Cabot does a high wire act and there is a truncated knife duel. The film provides little genuine New Orleans flavor and zero sense of history. We are not really sure if the film is set in 1850 or 1870, Are the African-Americans servants or slaves? Apparently, it doesn't matter. That said, the blacks in this film have more agency in this film than most in this era of Hollywood. In particular, Theresa Harris has her best role ever as a servant who is more partner in crime with Dietrich than a maid. Krasna and Clair utilize  the black characters in the segregated peanut gallery of an opera house where Young and Dietrich meet. Dietrich meets Young's gaze and then faints to draw him to her side while the peanut gallery denizens act as a chorus.

The Flame of New Orleans was a flop, but it has enough production values to make it above average entertainment. The costumes, artistic design, and cinematography by Rudolph Maté are all top notch. Dietrich and Young are always solid performers. The supporting cast is exemplary. Anne Revere, Melville Cooper, and Laura Hope Crews are enjoyable as Young's snooty relatives. Likewise, Andy Devine, Eddie Quillan, and Frank Jenks are fun as members of Cabot's crew. Mischa Auer and Franklin Pangborn are entertaining, if underused as a pair of European roués who know of Dietrich's shady past. Shemp Howard has an effective cameo as a scruffy cafe waiter. With all this talent, The Flame of New Orleans should have been a better film, but it is a fitfully amusing trifle. 

The Best of Robert Redford

           

                                                               1936 -- 2025

                      I think a lot of people think my career started with Butch Cassidy.

1)  The Way We Were                            Sydney Pollack                           1973

2)  The Candidate                                  Michael Ritchie                           1972

3)  The Great Waldo Pepper                  George Roy Hill                          1975

4)  All the President's Men                    Alan J. Pakula                             1975

5)  Legal Eagles                                      Ivan Reitman                              1986

6)  Jeremiah Johnson                            Sydney Pollack                           1972

7)  The Sting                                           George Roy Hill                           1973

8)  Inside Daisy Clover                          Robert Mulligan                           1965

9)  Downhill Racer                                 Michael Ritchie                            1969

10) Barefoot in the Park                        Gene Saks                                    1967

I also enjoyed his performances in The Chase, The Hot Rock, Three Days of the Condor, Sneakers, All is Lost and countless television shows in the early 1960s. Probably the biggest star in the world for a few years before the ascendency of Burt Reynolds. More than a few contemporaries of my mother voiced approval of his form within my earshot way back in the 1970s. He peaked with The Way We Were which best exploited his status as a sex symbol. The failure of The Great Gatsby, which highlighted his bland impenetrability, marked the onset of his gradual decline as a box office attraction. Early on, he displayed his facility with mendacity (...Daisy Clover) and comedy (Barefoot...), but Redford was mired in too many star vehicles designed to show off his handsome visage.

La Notte

Monica Vitti

I recently revisited Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte for the first time in about four decades and felt that, as a piece of film craft, it has held up rather well. I've always been of two minds about Antonioni. He was obviously a cinematic master, able to express anomie through a mise en scene that displays man adrift in a modern maze of his own making. The opening segment of La Notte which pictures Milan as a grid of modernist architecture is the foremost example of this, a cold and gleaming evocation of alienation circa 1961.   

Antonioni's lack of warmth and humor has always bugged me, though. His characters often seem like ciphers, existing only to put across philosophical concepts. The party at a large estate that takes up most of the runtime of The Night is a good example of this. The central married couple of the film, played by Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, flirt with potential lovers, but the party, though extravagant, is listless and enervating. As one character puts it, "Nothing ever happens." Society ends up applauding a horse's ass. The reaction against Antonioni's pretensions was best summed up by the title of Pauline Kael's famous essay, The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties in which she also dissed La Dolce Vita and Last Year at Marienbad. 

Characterization is lacking in Antonioni's work. Mastroianni is playing a famous writer, but has little to say except meaningless epigrams like "D'Annunzio's turtle died of colic after eating flowers." His character is supposed to be a hollow man, but Mastroianni is too soulful a performer to be convincing. This is the same conundrum as when he played Camus' Meursault in Visconti's L'Étranger. There is a similar vacuity to Moreau's character, who like Mastroianni is able to project at least a spark of personality with her eyes. The couple reconcile at the end by rutting in the mire: Antonioni's version of a happy ending. 

No one in the film registers as a flesh and blood human in the film. Bernhard Wicki's performance as a dying friend at the start of the picture is so ridiculously overwrought that one appreciates Moreau and Mastroianni's restraint in comparison. The nymphomaniac who attempts to seduce Mastroianni in the hospital seems to emanate from another picture, perhaps the cartoonish pulp of Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor.  

What I have come to appreciate as I get more decrepit is the formal beauty of La Notte. Gianni Di Venanzo's high contrast, black and white cinematography sings. Life may be relatively meaningless for Antonioni, but it has a visual and erotic charge. The characters in the film do not seem specific because they are functioning within variations on a theme: duet for husband and lover, duet for wife and lover, a duet of love until death for wife and husband. It may be discordant, but as La Notte unspools, I hear music.          

The Happy Ending

Jean Simmons

Richard Brooks' The Happy Ending is a feminist melodrama that I found to be a good deal more interesting than most critics did in 1969. Brooks was an unyieldingly macho director, but after the popular success of The Professionals and In Cold Blood, he penned The Happy Ending as a change of pace and an opportunity to provide a good meaty role for his missus, Jean Simmons. The film's tone is satiric, influenced by The Graduate and Two for the Road. Unfortunately, a light touch is needed and Brooks tends to bludgeon his audience with his message. I laughed when I read a thumbnail description of the film: "An affluent Denver woman (Simmons) gets drunk, pops pills and walks out on her lawyer husband (John Forsythe) of 16 years." However, the satire of the film is so mean spirited and grim that there are few genuine laughs in the movie. 

The 1953 courtship of Simmons' and Forsythe's characters is displayed in a musical montage sequence that opens the film, underpinned by Michel Legrand's score. We hear the film's theme song, "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life", for the first of many times. Mary (Simmons) and Fred (Forsythe) are on the cusp of an anniversary shindig, when Mary bolts for an impromptu getaway to the Bahamas. She is deeply dissatisfied with her life. Her husband has cut off her financial independence after one too many alcoholic incidents and a suicide attempt. Mary now eschews alcohol, but is dependent on pills and her life feels listless and empty. On the plane to Nassau, she meets an old college friend Flo (Shirley Jones) who reaches out to Mary in her time of need. Flo, a self-described "well-educated trollop", has flitted from married man to married man, the latest of whom is a wealthy businessman well played by Lloyd Bridges. Ms. Jones, who won an Oscar under Brooks' direction for Elmer Gantry, provides much needed warmth to the film. Partridge Family fans will be shocked by her nude scene, though Brooks made some cuts to change the film's ratings from M to R. Nanette Fabray is effective as Fred and Mary's loyal maid, though I could have done without the scene where she holds a phone in her crotch.

While in Nassau, Mary flirts with a gigolo played by a badly cast Bobby Darin. Robert Darin, as he was billed here, gives it a good try, but looks too sickly to be a stud. He does nail the (overexplained) desperation of the character. The movie reviews Fred and Mary's marital life in flashback as the picture progresses. Simmons performance is such a study in self abnegation that she was awarded an Oscar nomination. Not only do we get to see her get busted for a DUI, with a very feeble puke scene, but she also gets her stomach pumped for her troubles. To Brooks' credit, he does not end the picture with a contrite Mary going back hat in hand to her hubby. Mary opts for a life of her own, deserting not only Fred, but a teenage daughter who seems extraneous to the flick. Simmons offers a very good performance of a rarity in a Hollywood film, then or now, a three dimensional middle aged woman. However, the film sank commercially and so did Simmons' career. Forsythe gives a typically inert and somnambulant performance. He is not quite wooden, but does seem etched in stone. This is not fatal to the film, Fred's life with Mary is meant to be dull, but it doesn't help either. Fred is supposed to be a glad-hander who is described to be "the life of every party" by one character. If Forsythe is the life of any party, it must be a sadly moribund one.

There is no shot like this in the film, but I do like the poster.

On the whole, most of the supporting players in the film offer effective performances. Teresa Wright, in a horrid wig, signals the greatest generation's disapproval of the baby boomers as Mary's mother. Dick Shawn is well cast as a slick advertising exec who is a pal of Fred's. He and Lloyd Bridges serve as mouthpieces for Brooks to decry the hollow materialism of the US in 1969. Tina Louise has a better part than usual. Brooks does place her cleavage under Forsythe's nose in one regrettable shot, but also gives her a good monologue decrying the beauty industry. However, Brooks undermines this speech with its setting: a poker game in a health club locker room with the bored housewives slugging Scotch. In the background, an overweight woman struggles to put on her undergarments. Ugly in more ways than one. There is more than a hint of misogyny in this sequence and another one in the health club where Simmons and a bevy of zaftig females torture themselves on exercise machines while patriotic music blares. Not satire, just bad taste. I also thought the Denver setting was overly anonymous.

I am not a fan of Michel Legrand who I feel was not a gifted melodist. However, the theme song, with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, is one of his more lasting achievements. It certainly was an Adult Contemporary hit in the day and has had a longer shelf life than its host film. Legrand sneaks a version of his previous hit movie theme, "Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair, into a cocktail lounge scene. The attempt to write a calypso number to evoke the Bahamas, is dreadful and embarrassing. The late Erin Moran, Joanie on Happy Days, appears briefly as the younger version of the daughter.

I wrote that I found more redeeming qualities in the film than critics at the time. Life magazine's Richard Schickel branded the film a "melodramatic travesty" and Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, described it as an exercise in "fatuousness". I do think the film's criticism of the beauty industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and social apathy have gained more currency with time. Also the picture's preoccupation with mass media and its effect on the brains of the American consumer looms larger post-internet. Mary watches a panned and scanned Casablanca looking for the happy Hollywood ending. There are constant interjections of audio and vocal snatches from television: violence, Nixon's inauguration, commercials. Brooks and longtime collaborator, cinematographer Conrad Hall include all means of advertising in their wide-screen frame, especially billboards. Richard Brody thinks the look of the film was informed by Antonioni, but I lean more towards the sway of Godard, particularly Pierrot le Fou. I don't think The Happy Ending is a good film, but it is not the disaster it was reputed to be at the time of its release.

Freaky Tales

 

Pedro Pascal

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Freaky Tales shows flashes of personality, but, ultimately, is too derivative for its own good. The film, in part, was inspired by the song "Freaky Tales" on the album Born to Mack by Oakland Hip-Hop icon Too Short. Set in 1987, the film unfolds in four interconnected chapters, all set in Oakland and Berkeley. An aspiring rap duo gets to perform with Too Short while punks in love battle Nazi skinheads at punk venue 924 Gilman street. A loan shark (Pedro Pascal) has one last job while the skinheads make the mistake of crossing Golden State Warrior star Sleepy Floyd. I was living in San Francisco in 1987, so I did feel a pang of nostalgia watching this paean to the neglected East Bay. I even got to see punk luminaries Flipper, and many lesser lights, at Gilman street during this era.

The locations are well used and the songs selected by Raphael Saadiq, whose discography I commend to all, are expertly chosen even when they are not by East Bay artists. The acting is all over the place. A lot of the younger performers are amateurish. Ben Mendelsohn, an actor I usually like and who has collaborated before with the directing duo, offers a one note snarl of a performance. Perhaps the fault lies in his character, a corrupt police detective who is so evil that he has spawned the lead skinhead (Mom, per usual, is absent from the flick). There are too many societal ills lumped in his character to make him believable. Pedro Pascal, an actor whose work I have never really cottoned to, is the most soulful thing in the film.

The picture is an obvious labor of love, stars and East Bay icons like Tom Hanks, Tim Armstrong, Too Short, and Marshawn Lynch all make cameos, so I salute the directing duo for trying something heartfelt instead of succumbing to Captain Marvel 2. However, the structure, playfulness with time, and use of a diner as an important setting are all too reminiscent of Pulp Fiction. I've enjoyed films that drank from this well (like Things to Do in Denver When Your Dead), but Freaky Tales crosses my personal Mendoza line because it has little to add to the Tarantino template except for its setting. As with Quentin, having the heroes smite evil doers seems more like wish fulfillment than catharsis.

Ensayo de un Crimen

Ernesto Alonso and Miroslava

Luis Buñuel's Ensayo de un Crimen (Rehearsal for a Crime) first premiered in Mexico in 1955. It got a belated release in the USA under the clunky title The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz. The film is based on a 1944 novel by Rodolfo Usigli, better known in Mexico as a dramatist. Usigli was a socially committed leftist playwright whose work was on occasion banned by his own government. He felt that the ideals of the Mexican Revolution had been betrayed, a notion that floats beneath the surface of the luxe, decadent, and evil bourgeois milieu of Ensayo de un Crimen. Usigli's politics jibe well with that of Buñuel's. A wedding in the third act of the film provides Bunuel an opportunity to satirize his usual targets: the unholy trinity of Church, state, and the aristocracy. To this tale of a music box that can conjure death, Buñuel lays on his trademark perversity and surrealism. A supremely crafted black comedy, Ensayo de un Crimen is among the best of the twenty or so films Buñuel made in Mexico between 1946 and 1965.

The film begins with a flashback to Archie's youth during the time of the Mexican Revolution. As a device, this allows Bunuel to sneak in some horrifying images from that era which we glimpse in a book. Then we meet the spoilt young Archie who is gifted a music box by his mother. That night, Archie's governess tell her charge a folk tale of a music box than can cause the death of one's enemies. Archie tests the box and his governess subsequently dies from a stray bullet shot by a rowdy bandolero in the street. Moving forward from the flashback, we see a now suave and grown up Archie (Ernesto Alonso) unburdening himself about his sins to a nun. Archie admits to the nun that he enjoyed the power his musical box gave him and in just a jiff the nun is herself deceased at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Archie tries to claim that he is culpable to the police and, in another flurry of flashbacks, he reviews the body count he has accumulated.  

Any film that hinges on a haunted musical box is playing with the viewer's suspension of disbelief. Similarly, the device of the flashback, which Buñuel utilizes gleefully, places the actions of the film outside the normal realms of time and space. Ensayo de un Crimen even employs a flash forward which turns out to be misleading. The sole touchstone we have throughout the film is Archie himself, who, despite his moral perfidy, is debonair and charming if a little weird. He wears a cape unironically and only drinks milk. He lives in splendor, seemingly magically, and indulges himself in a curious hobby, pottery. He romances, and contemplates killing, three women, each of whom has an inappropriate lover either due to age or marital status. Archie is never quite able to put the kibosh to his victims. They manage to die from other hands with, of course, the unseen help of the music box. 

Archie, thus, suffers the pain of contemplating his crimes without the pleasure of committing the deeds. His frustration is with both sex and death which are linked visually in the film from the get go: Archie's gaze goes from the face of his governess as she lies dying to her exposed legs. At the finale, he is able to renounce the music box's legacy by tossing it in a lake. He reunites with the one remaining femme who, earlier in the film, he has ritually killed by incinerating a mannequin of her. The melting figure is given loving close-ups by Buñuel. To further blur whatever boundaries remain, Buñuel alternates between shots of the actual mannequin and his actress (the doomed Miroslava) done up as the mannequin. Before the final walk off, Archie contemplates a mantis for a moment or two. We wonder if he will squash the creature, but he leaves the bug be. Animals recur throughout the films of Buñuel, a perpetual reminder from the master that man, despite his pretensions, is a finite creature, too. Perhaps Archie, freed from the music box, can lead a normal life of blissful domesticity. Behind the polished actors and production values, we can hear Buñuel suppress a chortle. Ensayo de un Crimen is a diabolically fun provocation.

All We Imagine as Light

Kani Kusnuti

I found Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light to be worthy of the plaudits lavished upon it. This fictional feature debut outlines the lives of three female workers at a Mumbai hospital. The film balances melodrama with realism, belying Ms. Kapadia background in documentary work.The main character is a sharp nurse of a certain age named Prabha (Kani Kusnuti). Prabha seems stressed and uptight and we soon learn why: her husband emigrated to Germany for work over a year ago and she has not heard from him in some time. Prabha shares a small flat with the younger woman named Anu. Anu (Diva Prabha) is more liberated in outlook than Prabha and is carrying on a hot romance with a young Muslim man named Shiaz. The third of the female trio is Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam), an older woman who Prabha attempts to aid when she faces eviction.

The other main character of the film is Mumbai in all its polyglot glory, gritty but bursting with pockets of sensual delight. Kapadia constantly repeats the motif  of his characters commuting to work in the crowded and bustling metropolis. Unlike most US medical shows, All We Imagine as Light does not hit us over the head with medical procedures or Noah Wylie barking at his minions. Kapadia stresses the little touches of humanity that enliven the work day. She even manages to inject some humor to leaven the melodrama. I enjoyed Prabha and Anu reviewing eligible bachelors on a dating app and won't soon forget Prabha instructing her younger charges on the proper way to dispose of a placenta. 

The film shifts locale for the final third. Parvathy decides she is through with Mumbai and returns to her native coastal village. Prabha and Anu help her move, though Anu is also motivated into taking this opportunity to have a hot, for Indian cinema, tryst with her lover. This sojourn gives the characters a way to face their past and future. Anu and Shiaz pledge to trumpet their love, no matter the consequences. Prabha, who earlier in the film slut shamed Anu for her lifestyle, moves towards acceptance of the lovers. In the film's only sequence that feels like a magically realistic misstep, Prabha briefly reunites with her husband in order to let him go. All in all, though, All We Imagine as Light was one of the better films released in 2024.

Beyond the Time Barrier

Darlene Tompkins and Robert Clarke

Edgar G. Ulmer's Beyond the Time Barrier is a black and white sci-fi cheapie released in 1960. It is bargain basement, but with more than a few reasons to recommend it to committed auteurists. The picture was part of a deal that Ulmer struck with star and producer Robert Clarke to film enough footage for two features in Texas in just two weeks. The other feature was entitled The Amazing Transparent Man and was also released in 1960. A disused air base and some futuristic looking exhibition buildings at the Texas State fairgrounds were the primary sets for ...Time Barrier. Ulmer's daughter has a major supporting role and his wife was the script editor. Script writer Arthur C. Pierce worked as an extra and a production assistant, so it was made with a sense of all hands on deck.

Clarke, a film industry veteran whose acting career peaked with his role in Ida Lupino's Outrage in 1950. had bitten off more than he could chew by writing, directing, producing, and starring in 1958's The Hideous Sun Demon. He and Ulmer had worked together on 1951's The Man from Planet X and had gotten along, so he was an obvious pick to alleviate Clarke's burden. Unfortunately, after shooting was completed, Clarke's financing fell apart and he had to sell the two film properties to American International Pictures. AIP shaped the film for their own purposes. They inserted into Beyond the Time Barrier a few clips, during the "mutant" section, from Journey to the Lost City, AIP's cut and paste version of Fritz Lang's two Indian epics. Beyond the Time Barrier feels padded, even at 74 minutes. It unspools like a 52 minute Twilight Zone episode that has been padded with exposition, lame fights, and characters moving deliberately from point a to point b.

If Mr. Pierce's script resembles a Twilight Zone episode, at least it resembles a good one, even with the requisite surprise ending. Clarke plays a test pilot who fulfills the title and flies into the future which we eventually learn is the year 2024. His old air base is unpopulated as is a nearby city. A futuristic metropolis, pictured with cheesy graphics, beckons and soon the pilot has been imprisoned by the new powers that be. The town is called The Citadel and is presided over by an elite coterie headed by the Supreme (Vladimir Sokoloff). Only the Supreme and his adjutant are capable of speech. Mankind has mutated into a devoluted form and is not only deaf and dumb, but also infertile. The more sickly mutants are imprisoned within a ghastly gulag. Only the Supreme's comely daughter, Trirene (Darlene Tompkins), holds within her the possibility of reproduction and she is quick to pin her hopes upon the pilot. The locals are chary with details, but we eventually learn that mankind was devastated by a plague from outer space, earth's protective atmospheric belts having been undermined by atomic testing.

Given that Sokoloff gets to play a Russian for once, he played Mexican in the same year's The Magnificent Seven, it is hard not to interpret the Supreme and his minions as stand-ins for our Cold War adversaries. Even so, Sokoloff's Supreme, a kindly uncle joe, is given moments of tender warmth with his daughter. Ulmer allows an equivocal portrait in line with his socialist humanism. I especially enjoyed a sequence featuring Ms. Tompkins primping before a mirror, both a smitten young girl and unobscure object of desire. I see lots of cheap AIP features, mostly biker and beach pictures, that I can't get through the whole way. Mostly cheap jive and shuck. I could sit through some of The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini just because it featured the Bobby Fuller Four, but that is a rare oasis in a desert of dada. Beyond the Time Barrier is equally slapdash, but has surprising sensitivity.

Eephus

         

Carson Lund's Eephus is a baseball movie in a minor key. Mr. Lund, whose previous claim to fame in the film world was being cinematographer on a number of Tyler Taormina films, has crafted a premier flick that stands as a elegiac ode to the sport. The film covers the course of a single game between two New Hampshire recreation league teams. Autumn is creeping in, literally and figuratively, as their beloved playing field is due to be bulldozed for a new school. That is the plot. Lund offers us no melodramatic flourishes or surprising twists. No breakdowns or marriage meltdowns. Just character sketches and the ballet of the game. In this case, a sloppy and shambolic ballet.That is for the best since most of Mr. Lund's cast are non-actors and include Boston Red Sox near great Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Sox announcer Joe Castiglione, documentarian Frederick Wiseman, and fashion designer Wayne Diamond. Results vary as does the comic timing. The most soulful performance is by Keith William Richards as an aging hurler pulled of the mound by his niece's christening.

Mr. Lee explains and demonstrates the eephus pitch, a slow bloopy curve not often seen at the major league level. It is this attention to the niggling details of the game that appeals to a baseball nut like me, though I wonder if it will hinder the film's worldwide appeal. Eephus' charms lie primarily in visual composition. Lund has an eye that is as exact and compelling as Edward Hopper. I also enjoyed the aural clutter and fake advertisements Lund employs, most emanating from a throwback boombox. The lack of cutting edge technology and the gorgeous autumnal New England foliage is appropriate to a game that is in the midst of a slow decline; as is cinema. The ascendancy of baseball can be traced by the rise of Babe Ruth and the decline of Mickey Mantle. When I listen to sports radio, chatter about the sport ranks a poor third below football and basketball. The presence of Mr. Wiseman is key here because I believe Mr. Lund wanted to document a game and a small town ritual before it disappears.