The Adventures of Hajji Baba

                     

Don Weis' The Adventures of Hajji Baba is a wide screen Technicolor hoot. When I compare it to such tired, socially responsible crap from 1954 as The Country Girl, I further appreciate Weis' buoyancy and colorful flair. The film is exotic schlock, a formula producer Walter Wanger had followed for 1942's Arabian Nights. The Adventures of Hajji Baba, likewise, did boffo biz. Why? The film has a shopworn plot, little characterization, but boasts more flesh on the screen than any other American film of the 1950s. Fifteen minutes had to be shorn from the American cut before it could be shown in the UK. After Weis establishes the film's milieu in one shot, color coordinated slave girls behind bars, he shows Hajji Baba (John Derek) plying one of his trades, which include Don Juan, barber, masseuse, and swordsman, by giving Claude Akins an oily rubdown. I hope Derek got hazard pay. Weis is able to instantly conjure the camaraderie of a community, notwithstanding the fact that he has a cast of very unlikely Arabs, such as the blue eyed Derek.

Establishing a milieu: the first shot of The Adventure of Hajji Baba

Hajji is tasked with protecting a willful princess (Elaine Stewart, as stiff as knotty pine) during a bewildering number of fracases. They both get tied up and tortured numerous times. Hajji makes time with every featured femme in the flick. Despite this and the countless harems we see, the women in this picture all have spunk and agency. In fact, one of the gals Hajji locks lips with is the leader of a rebellious Amazon gang played by flame haired Amanda Blake; soon to be Miss Kitty on television's Gunsmoke. This flick conveys the cheap thrills of pulp and peplum within an eye popping comic book framework. John Derek, villainized as Bo Derek's Svengali, is not bad. I prefer him to Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter. Weis started out promisingly with such trifles as The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, I Love Melvin, and this picture. By the 1960s, he was hopelessly out of step: Billie and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini are among the worst pictures of any era. Weis' bread and butter became television work: glimpses of a jaunty survivor can be found in episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Remington Steele.

 

Another factor that helps make The Adventures of Hajji Baba spritely entertainment is its vigorous score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Tiomkin was coming off the huge success of his score for High Noon and its attendant single, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin. Some thought Frankie Laine's hit version of the ballad saved that film commercially. Consequentially, a single was derived from the main theme of ...Hajji Baba featuring Nat King Cole on vocals with Nelson Riddle arranging. It was never more than a B side, but Cole's mellifluous voice pops up every five minutes of the film burbling "...Hajji Baba." It is bananas, but fits snugly within a film that is already cuckoo for cocoa puffs. Tiomkin's orchestral score is exciting and exotic without depending on Orientalist tropes.

 

L'Amour et les Forets

Virginie Efira and Melvil Poupaud

Valérie Donzelli's L'Amour et les Forêts (Love and the Forests) is a not quite good film with many elements that I enjoyed. The flick was released in the US in 2024 under the anodyne title Just the Two of Us. Ms. Donzelli and Audrey Diwan adapted the script from Éric Reinhardt's novel. The film chronicles an abusive marriage from the point of view of the mistreated wife, Blanche (Virginie Efira). The story is told in flashback as Blanche recounts the arc of her marriage to Grégoire (Melvil Poupaud) to her divorce lawyer. Blanche and Grégoire enjoy a whirlwind romance though Blanche's twin sister, Rose (Ms. Efira doing double duty), is not sold on the lug. After the happy couple settle down and produce two children, Grégoire reveals his needy and controlling nature. Starved for true affection, Blanche takes a lover which sends hubby over the edge. Grégoire morphs into a furniture smashing monster who spies on his wife and drives her to a suicide attempt. A stay in a mental hospital helps bring Blanche to her senses and she leaves the facility determined to leave her husband. More (mild) terror awaits, of course. 

I liked some of Ms. Donzelli's directorial strategies. We first see Blanche against a fragmented background and scraps of memories, usually concerning happy times with her lover, intersperse her reverie. This seems an apt way to covey that Blanche is trying to piece together the shards of her broken life. However, some techniques don't work. I usually like it when a director color codes a film, but the choice to use red for eros and blue for fear seems too facile to me. The film lacks humor or irony. The only touch that gave me a mordant chuckle was that Blanche and Grégoire secret shared love word is verite. I think the initial rendezvous between Blanche and her lover is bungled. He breaks the ice with her by teaching her archery, surely a prime opportunity to register the thwack of cupid's dart. However, the scene is neither elegant nor erotic. Certainly, as this former archery counselor can attest, no one on the set knew how to properly notch and release an arrow.

For a psychological thriller, L'Amour et les Forêts lacks psychological insight. We learn nothing of Grégoire's background or family. He is a relative cipher and that makes the film a little too formulaic. Now this flaw may stem from the source novel, but it flattens the film's texture. I also felt the Tartuffe reference was too on the nose in trumpeting the theme: two faces have I. Nevertheless, the level of acting in the film is outstanding. Ms. Efira, a major star in Europe but under appreciated stateside, is particularly adept at projecting her character's plight through her soulful eyes. I thought Mr. Poupaud's performance was good at expressing his character's surface charm and desperation, but it lacked volcanic energy during the numerous frenzied rages. The supporting players are uniformly superb, especially Dominique Reymond as Blanche's lawyer, Marie Rivière, and Virginie Ledoyen.

Book Review: Hitchcock & Herrmann by Steven C. Smith

Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann mug for a publicity shot

Steven C. Smith's Hitchcock and Herrmann is a well written and researched survey of the collaboration between the two maestros that lasted from 1955 (The Trouble with Harry) to 1964 (Marnie). The relationship foundered when Hitchcock rejected Hermann's proposed score for Torn Curtain, but it is amazing that the collaboration between these two needy and anxious geniuses lasted as long as it did. Mr. Smith's reliance on first person interviews, not all his own, prevents the book from suffering from the phantasms of some of the volumes about Hitchcock. Smith's main bailiwick is music, he is the author of esteemed biographies of both Herrmann and Max Steiner, so the tome should have been titled Herrmann and Hitchcock. However it is titled, the book is welcome because there is an oceanic amount of scholarship on Hitchcock, but only a trickle about Herrmann. Instead of rehashing his biography about Herrmann, Smith enlists a bevy of music lovers, ranging from conductor/composer William Stromberg to New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, to analyze and assess Hermann's scores. The book is learned, but not in an ostentatious way. You do not need a background in music theory to appreciate the book.

That said, I wish it had a discography. Herrmann produced an amazing array of music and guidance is needed. Besides the scores for his Hitchcock films, I recommend the scores to Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Devil and Daniel Webster (which shows off his debt to Charles Ives), Jane Eyre, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Day the Earth Stood Still, On Dangerous Ground, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Cape Fear, Jason and the Argonauts, The Bride Wore Black, Sisters, Taxi Driver, and, my personal favorite, Fahrenheit 451. Some of these are hard to track down, but all are worth listening to on their own. Smith touches on the full breadth of Herrmann's career, from music for radio and television shows to classical cantatas, so I am sure there is much more to explore.

Remarkably Bright Creatures

Sally Field and Lewis Pullman

Olivia Newman's adaptation of Remarkably Bright Creatures is pleasant fare. Any adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt's bestselling novel would suffer from the contrivances and cutesy anthropomorphism of that magically realistic work, but Newman's restraint and the efforts of a well chosen and talented cast made for palatable viewing even for this hardened cynic. Set in the present day Pacific Northwest, the film and novel tells of two damaged loners who bond over an aging octopus in a small aquarium. The octopus (voiced mellifluously by Alfred Molina) is named Marcellus and provides occasional narration, somewhat dismissive of his human captors, that gives the film a welcome sardonic note. Tova (Sally Field) is an elderly widow in a small coastal town work who works nights at the aquarium where Marcellus becomes her sounding board. After Tova injures her ankle, she tutors her replacement, Cameron (Lewis Pullman), a drifter at loose ends after the dissolution of his band. Both Tova and Cameron have trauma lingering from their past which, with the help of each other and Marcellus, they work through.

If you detect a bit of snideness to this description, that would be accurate. The reveals of the mysteries of Tova and Cameron's past trauma are extremely pat and predictable. However, the scenery is pleasant, the CGI sterling, and Newman's brisk pacing never lets us focus too closely on the many improbabilities of the plot. Remarkably Bright Creatures' supporting cast makes the film a good hang. In what could have been token roles, romantic foils for the two leads, Sofia Black-D'Elia and Colm Meaney both display great charm and skill. It is certainly nice to see Mr. Meaney, who has played a host of villains and boors in a long career,  shine in an appealing role. The fact that his character is a Deadhead portrayed for once without cliché is an added bonus even to someone like me who has never cottoned to Jerry Garcia and company. Tova's female friends, who are self-dubbed the "Knit-Wits" and include Joan Chen and Beth Grant. are an amusing flibbertigibbet Greek chorus. Their standout is Kathy Baker, at the end of a career that has not matched her talent, who gets to tell Tova to snap out of her funk in the film's best monologue.  

The presence of Sally Field often elicits a diabetic reaction from critics and sophisticated audiences. First, the legacies of Gidget and The Flying Nun had to be overcome. Even when she won two Oscars, Field's plain Jane sincerity ("You like me, you like me") brought more ridicule than respect. In the long run though, I believe she has given as many great screen performances as Meryl Streep. It is a testament to Ms. Fields' talent and Ms. Newman's touch that Tova never seems ridiculous even when addressing an octopus. Ms. Newman also brings out heretofore unexploited aspects of Lewis Pullman's capabilities. His warmth and ingratiating awkwardness here bode well for his future.              

Squeal

Algars Vilims and Kevin Janssens

Aik Karapetian's Squeal, currently streaming on Tubi, is the most interesting and impressive film I've seen since Sam Raimi's Send Help. Squeal received no theatrical release in the US and has generated little critical scrutiny. The reasons for this are obvious. While only superficially a horror film, a foreigner is chained up inside a pig barn a la Hostel, there is enough porcine viscera on display to seemingly disqualify the picture from serious attention. Also what kind of publicity can a film directed by an Armenian set in Latvia and populated by its denizens receive. However, Squeal is a deceivingly complex allegory, chock full with allusions, that seems to me one of the best films released in 2021.    

Belgian actor Kevin Janssens plays Samuel, a visitor to Latvia who we first encounter driving that country's back roads searching for his long lost father. He accidentally strikes a pig in the road, who will prove to be his guide on this hero's journey, and then he encounters a dour local woman named Kirke (Laura Silina). She beckons him to seek shelter at the pig farm she runs with her aged father (a splendidly sulphureous Aigars Vilims). She feeds Samuel and plies him with homemade vodka and when he awakes the next morning, he finds that he is an enchained prisoner living in a pigsty. After a few obligatory beatings, Kirke and her father are able to convince Samuel to help out by performing the most odious chores on the farm. Kirke, who has learned some English from her dead mother, is able to converse with Samuel and they tentatively bond. However, Samuel is coveted by two neighboring elders while their grotesque charge (a stunning Normunds Griestins), Jancuks, wants to take Kirke for his own. Complications ensue until Samuel, briefly, gains his freedom with the help of the magically realistic pig; a pattern that repeats.

Laura Silina

I don't want to dwell too much on the plot because, despite its fabulistic nature, Squeal has a few surprises in store that I don't want to divulge. One way to interpret the film is as a political allegory like Animal Farm. Though both works posit pigs as the lumpen proletariat, Squeal is not about the Russian Revolution. Instead it functions as an allegory about resistance to and assimilation of immigrants in modern day Europe. Samuel is initially derided and vilified as a "foreigner" by the locals. However, because of his physical prowess, Samuel earns the respect of the rural folk. By film's end he has been assimilated into the community, marrying and impregnating Kirke. The film never descends into mere allegory because of the multi-dimensionality of the characters and performances. All the leads are superb. Mr. Janssens, who is chained and naked for the first third of the film, gives one of the best physical performances I've seen in some time. His combination of brawniness and vulnerability reminded me of Viggo Mortensen's performances in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. The film avoids a fairy tale ending as Samuel spies the magical pig who has aided him leaving the farm for a life of freedom. He wonders if he is better off enjoying the tyranny of domesticity or the liberty of the rootless. It illustrates the binary posited by the great writer Dave Hickey: is he a pirate or a farmer?

The other aspect of this intriguing film that I want to touch on are its allusions to Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, another tale of an outsider and his troubling assimilation into European society. Both films employ an ironic and omniscient narrator. The musical theme played during two key scenes between Kirke and Samuel is one of the two love themes employed in Barry Lyndon: the Irish folk tune "Women of Ireland". The scene where Kirke serves Samuel a meal mirrors the one in which Redmond Barry is seduced by a comely German woman. The twist in Squeal is that the meal is a honey trap. A later scene between Kirke and Samuel also offers a variation on the scene in which Barry attempts to locate a piece of cloth in the bodice of his kissing cousin. Furthermore, a scene in which Samuel rescues Kirke's father after he is shot during a fracas calls to mind Barry rescuing his injured commanding officer in the Kubrick film. I feel that the allusions are neither obscure nor gratuitous, but add to the texture of a magnificent film that unspools in a scant 85 minutes. 

Hell Harbor

Lupe Vélez

Henry King's Hell Harbor is a raucous melodrama that belies King's later reputation as a staid and stodgy yarn spinner. The 1930 film is a vehicle for Lupe Vélez and was one of the last gasps of Inspiration Pictures which had been formed by King, Charles H Duell, and Richard Barthelmess in 1921 to make Tol'able David.  Vélez plays Anita Morgan who has lived all her life in a small port city on an unnamed Caribbean island yearning for something bigger and more exciting. Her father (Gibson Gowland), a descendent of the pirate Henry Morgan, is a brute who wants to barter her off to an unscrupulous and repellent moneylender (Jean Hersholt). Anita's deus ex machina is an American sea captain played by the forgettable and forgotten John Holland.

As you can tell from the cursory description, the plot of Hell Harbor is no great shakes. It was cobbled together by at least three screenwriters from the novel Out of the Night by Rida Johnson Young. Young wrote over thirty plays and musicals and is best known for writing the book and lyrics to Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta; not my jam, really. However, with the exception of Mr. Holland, the cast of Hell Harbor is continually interesting. Where else can you see the two male leads of Greed reunited and as venal as ever. Before she became a punchline in films like Mexican Spitfire, Vélez was an appealing and beguiling leading lady. She provides much needed spunk and and charm to this flick. Goofy comic relief is provided by two dependable veterans: Harry Allen and Al St. John. King's direction sometimes seems crude and haphazard, but there are moments of sublime lyricism, too. Rondo Hatton appears as a bouncer.

The Cabin in the Cotton

Richard Barthelmess and Bette Davis           

Michael Curtiz's The Cabin in the Cotton is one of the more under rated American films of 1932. This Warners/First National flick is one of many pictures about rural Americana released after the salad days of Griffith and Ince, but before the fateful Variety headline Hix Nix Stix Pix. The Cabin in the Cotton is set amidst the cotton fields of the American South and is based on a 1931 novel by Harry Harrison Knoll. The adaptation was by Paul Green, a then noted, now forgotten playwright who won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Abraham's Bosom. Green, who was leftist enough to collaborate with Kurt Weill and sleep with Lotte Lenya, amplifies the portrait of class warfare present in the novel. The film has a frankness about class issues that would be remarkable even if the film was released to today.

When the film commences, the main character, Marvin Blake (Richard Barthelmess), is the teenaged son of tenant farmers working the cotton fields owned by Lane Norwood (Berton Churchill). Marvin is trying to better himself by going to school when his plans are upended by his father's sudden death. Norwood agrees to pay for Marvin's continued schooling, if he will work for Norwood after he gets his degree. Marvin ends up running Norwood's general store and keeping the books for him. However, Norwood has an ulterior motive for his kindness to Marvin. His tenant farmers, who resent Norwood for the usurious loans he has saddled them with, have been pilfering cotton and other goods from Norwood and he wants Marvin to rat on them. In turn, the tenant farmers want Marvin to use his smarts to sell their ill-gotten cotton. Marvin's plight is mirrored by the love triangle he finds himself in. The other two points being Betty (Dorothy Jordan), the earnest daughter of a tenant farmer, and Madge (Bette Davis), the saucy daughter of Norwood. After the tumult of melodramatic events, including a lynching and a fire, a kindly district attorney and Marvin are able to negotiate a truce between the farmers and the landowners.

The Cabin in the Cotton is strictly a backlot film. Painted backdrops and rear projection documentary footage are utilized to give the illusion of the outdoors. That is just as well, because Curtiz has always struck me as a director who is not really interested in portraying nature for its own sake. He is more at home in portraying the tangle of human relationships (most successfully in Casablanca) and The Cabin in the Cotton's scenario gives him ample opportunity to etch ambiguous motivations. Berton Churchill's Norwood is your typical Churchill performance, that of a bloviating and selfish fat cat. Yet, not all of the landowners are portrayed in the same light. Likewise, not all of the tenant farmers in the film are paragons of virtue. Some are as venal as Norwood and the efforts of such legendary stock players as Russell Simpson and Henry B. Walthall make them come to life. Curtiz's signature motif in the film are close-ups of hands, pushing and pulling, grabbing and entreating as a symbol of emotional manipulation. Another of Curtiz's coups in the film is the memorable staging of two dance sequences. The farmers' dance is to old time fiddle music as they do the Virginia Reel to Turkey in the Straw and The Girl I Left Behind Me. Norwood, after prodding by Madge, hires a black (or "yella" as one hick describes them) band from Memphis who play that new fangled jazz music. At one point, the band is instructed to play a "peckerwood wiggle", which mocks the poor folks.

Barthelmess, who was a big silent star, was nearing the end of his career as a leading man. At 37, he is too old to play his character. He never had the greatest amount of range, but I think his closed in performance, an augury of his embittered take in Only Angels Have Wings, is appropriate for the role. His character is a study in vacillation and Barthelmess is able to convey this. Ms Jordan's character is so anodyne that she hardly registers at all. The opposite is true of Ms. Davis who gives an outstanding, indeed star making, performance. This is the film in which she delivered the immortal line, "I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair."

Davis plays a fun loving minx without a trace of censoriousness. Her Madge is a gloriously natural creature, never ashamed to flirt, pet, or get turned on.

Comment ca va?

Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean_Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville's Comment ça va? (How's It Going?) is one of several Marxist Structuralist film essays that emerged from the Godard multiverse in the mid 1970s to little acclaim and attention. It crudely intermixes film, video and text, has amateurish camera work, and indifferent acting. Nevertheless, I was engaged with the film's philosophical struggles throughout. There is more to chew on here than in twenty typical features. I am generally not thrilled with Godard's Marxist platitudes, but he proved to be prescient on the great technological change of our era. We now live in an age in which the image has gained primacy over text. This has had an incalculable effect on human psychology and it was the primary theme of the latter half of Godard's career up to his final feature, The Image Book.

The two main characters in the film work for an unnamed paper, presumably Libération, a Leftist daily founded by Serge July and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973. As the decade unfolded, the paper moved to the center-left and it in this context that the idealogical conflicts of the film should be viewed. The dueling editors are played by Michel Marot, in real life a distinguished architect, and Ms. Miéville, here dubbed intriguingly "Odette". Odette and the unnamed character played by Mr. Marot are collaborating on a documentary on the newspaper biz. The film is a meta comment on itself, bien sur. The pair squabble with Odette taking the high road, i.e. the doctrinaire Marxist way, as Marot prevaricates. "Objectivity is a crime," she barks at him and he eventually sees her that she is right to adhere to resistance as the only just response to the world. Odette is filmed from the back or with her face in shadow, all we see are Miéville's blonde tresses. You cannot gaze directly into the face of truth or, in this case, Godard's final muse.

The primary duo is contrasted with a young proletarian couple, in a movie filled with dialectics, played by Christian Fenovillat and Catherine Floriet. He works as a machinist while she tends to domestic chores. There is no idealogical discussion between the two, they seem perfectly happy to canoodle on their couch oblivious to the television behind them spewing Lies Writ Large. Here I have to advise readers that I think Wikipedia's page on this film misreads the plot. It conflates Odette's character with Ms. Floriet's character. Ms. Floriet is a brunette, as you can see below, while Ms. Miéville is a blonde. It is a murky and tangled movie, but I think the fact that Wikimedia misreads a film about media disinformation is perfect irony. Now more than ever, one cannot believe what one reads and sees.

Catherine Floriet

Comme ça va? is structured like a B noir, opening and closing with Marot's deadpan narration. Now I am going to disclose the ending of the film because if you've read this far about Structuralism, French politricks, and whatnot, you can take it. Odette and Marot's film is rejected by the "Central Committee" of the paper in a fashion that, like much of the film, resembles Struggle sessions during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. After this rejection, Odette leaves the paper and disappears from Marot's life. Now if this was a true noir Odette would have been shown getting iced by the party, but I'm not sure Godard was that prescient about the Party or had enough of a budget. Comment ça va is even more relevant in an era in which my country is befuddled by the fog of war. The powers that be learned one lesson from Vietnam: no more reporters on the ground with combat troops and we are seeing or not seeing the results.

Dark Water

       

Hideo Nakata's Dark Water is an effective horror film with a palpable sense of unease. This 2002 flick is slow paced, all the better to encase the audience in its gunky atmosphere. The film centers around a woman going through a contentious divorce named Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki). She is battling over the custody of her six year old daughter, Ikuko (Rio Kanno) with a husband who is willing to fight dirty, including bringing up Yoshimi's past mental health issues. Under enormous stress, she must find a job and a new place to live. She finds a promising job in publishing, but her new digs are another matter. She and her daughter find themselves in a dilapidated and putrid apartment building in a flat that has water seeping from the ceiling. If that is not enough, mother and daughter soon both glimpse what seems to be a supernatural presence who may be leading them astray.

Dark Water conveys its atmospheric dread with a dour look. Even when the characters are outside their creepy domicile, the weather is overcast or raining. The film has a stomach churning palette, primarily grays and sickly greens. The few uses of primary colors, a yellow slicker and a red child's purse, are linked with the supernatural. Mr. Nakata, primarily known in this country for Ringu, elicits chillingly effective performances from his two leads. If Dark Water has a flaw it is that its scenario is overly reliant on tropes from its antecedents, namely Don't Look Now and The Shining. 

The Wet Parade

Dorothy Jordan, Robert Young, and Walter Huston

Victor Fleming's The Wet Parade is a mediocre melodrama based on a then recent novel by Upton Sinclair. This 1932 MGM production cannot escape the limitations of its source material, a dashed off anti-alcohol screed that was one of over a hundred books Sinclair produced. Sinclair was the son of an alcoholic salesman and he obviously had an axe to grind. The novel and film both picture two families, one southern and one northern, who are brought to ruin by demon rum. First we meet the southern Chilcote family in 1916, presided over by pixilated paterfamilias Lewis Stone. Stone has a son, Rog (Neil Hamilton), who is following his besotted example and a disapproving daughter named Maggie May (Dorothy Jordan). Stone makes a half-hearted attempt to stay sober, but ends up dead face down in a pig pen; about as low as one can go in an MGM production.

Rog moves on to New York City where he moves into a tatty SRO hotel managed by Kip Tarleton (Robert Young). Kip is saddled with a drunken Dad played by Walter Huston. Huston's orotund and grandiose performance as a drunkard still stuck in the Gay 90s is the main reason to see the picture. Maggie May shows up in town, primarily to pair off with fellow teetotaler Kip. Kip's father's decline continues unabated by prohibition. In fact, the film makes plain how pernicious the effects of bathtub gin and the like were in those days. When Huston's hootch is destroyed by his wife (Clara Blandick), he becomes enraged and beats her to death. That's right, Auntie Em is clubbed to death. Huston is sentenced to life in prison and disappears from the picture. Kip sells his hotel and becomes a prohibition agent for the Treasury Department. His partner is Jimmy Durante, whose schtick seems out of place here but whose presence belies what an over stuffed production this is. The picture really climaxes with Blandick's murder at the 75 minute mark, but there are still 43 minutes to go. 

Rog is soon going to hell on a sled with the help of a party girl played by a peroxided Myrna Loy. Rog drinks too much cheap rotgut and is blinded, putting him on the road to redemption. In the novel, Kip is rubbed out by gangster, but, in the film, it is Durante's character who makes the ultimate sacrifice. The film is a tad bit more equivocal about Prohibition than Sinclair was. While alcohol is shown to be pernicious in the film, the unexpected effects of Prohibition are made so plain that even Kip is doubting its efficacy by film's end. MGM uses medleys of patriotic songs to paper over the political divide. 1932 was an election year with Franklin Delano Roosevelt upending Herbert Hoover in November. Though the Crash had been the central issue, Prohibition also had its impact. The Democrats ran as the Wet party.

The best scene in The Wet Parade has Walter Huston delivering a stemwinder stump speech for Woodrow Wilson in 1916. The film cross cuts to a contemporaneous Republican response 

which is a carbon copy presented for ironic effect. Huston gives one of the best performances of a drunk I've ever seen. Neil Hamilton is less convincing in his sodden moments, but is good at projecting his character's diffidence. Robert Young's sincerity jibes with his character in one of his finest performances. Dorothy Jordan barely registers, but that is probably because her character is a complete pill. Ms. Jordan appeared in over twenty films between 1929 and 1933 then retreated from the screen after marrying Merian C. Cooper. After a long hiatus, Jordan appeared in three of Cooper's productions for John Ford: The Sun Shines Bright, The Searchers, and The Wings of Eagles.

The Wet Parade suffers from the deficiencies of its source novel. The handling of class and race issues is particularly clumsy. Even Victor Fleming's biographer derides the project as "a barely viewable film made out of an unreadable book." 🎁 However, I think Fleming redeems the irredeemable somewhat with his boisterous handling of crown scenes: the salons, saloons, speakeasies, and political pow-wows of the film. Sometimes MGM's luxe production values pay off: I loved briefly spying a recreation of the St Regis Hotel's Old King Cole Bar. On the whole, though, The Wet Parade is recommended only to the hardiest of old time film buffs.

🎁 Michael Sragow, Victor Fleming, page 176.

Outcome

Keanu Reeves and Jonah Hill

Jonah Hill's Outcome is a toothless Hollywood satire destined for obscurity. Keanu Reeves stars as Reef Hawk, a top flight Tinseltown star returning to his career after a five year hiatus brought on by various addictions. As part of his rehabilitation, Hawk is making amends to figures from his past who he has let down, ranging from his mother (a game Susan Lucci) to his first manager (Martin Scorsese). However, his comeback is threatened when Hawk is blackmailed by someone who has got a hold of a compromising video from his past. 

Mr. Hill, who wrote the screenplay along with Ezra Woods, also appears as Hawk's lawyer. Unfortunately, Jonah Hill the director indulges Jonah Hill the actor in a number of scenery chewing scenes that reek of self-indulgence. There is some smart repartee in the film. I did enjoy Ivy Wolk's wry asides and David Spade is well cast as a weasel. However, Hill has little visual imagination and most of the cast, especially Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer, are stranded in rote roles. Outcome is not funny enough to be an effective farce and not insightful enough for any dramatic payoff. The fact that Hawk can't remember the incident that he is being blackmailed about makes one wonder what the big deal is. If it was established early on that Hawk was enjoying sexual congress with a dog on the video or something of that nature, then his panic would be understandable. As it is, it is hard for the audience to maintain sympathy for a handsome and rich character who is not really under siege. Once the nature of the video is revealed, the somewhat less than shocking nature of it renders much of what has gone on before as superfluous. A description that would fit the entirety of Outcome to a tee.                                    

Little Trouble Girls

Jara Sofija Ostan

Urška Djukić's Little Trouble Girls is one of the most promising feature debuts of 2025. This compact Slovenian film tells the story of shy and sheltered Lucija and her sexual and psychological awakening during a summer choir retreat at a convent. A short scene of Lucija riding in a car with her mother displays her repressed background, as her mother expresses her disapproval of girls Lucija age, sixteen, wearing lipstick. Once at the convent retreat, Lucija falls under the spell of the choir's queen bee, the more mature and sophisticated Ana Maria (Mina Svajger). Ana Maria, who would qualify in the US as a mean girl, leads Lucija astray with sapphic come-ons and by urging Lucija to join her in ogling the construction workers toiling at the convent.

Lucija is, at first, intrigued by Ana Maria, but, ultimately, becomes justifiably repulsed by her manipulations. She makes the mistake of tattling on Ana Maria to her choir master (a suitably spineless Saša Tabaković). The conductor treats her not with understanding, but disdain. He reacts by humiliating Lucija in front of the choir, criticizing her, admittedly pinched and hesitant, singing. Lucija becomes persona non grata within her peer group. Director Djukić manages to elicit marvelously unaffected performances from her young cast. She crowds the frame in the interior sequences to suggest the dual nature of adolescent intimacy: both alluring and suffocating. She gives the film a palpable feel of sensuality, foregrounding the throb and heave of bodies. When Lucija masturbates in a bathroom stall, Djukić provides a close-up of her thorax, writhing with forbidden pleasure. When Lucija spies on a particularly hunky worker, Djurkić provides a point of view shot from her perspective of the man's muscular arm, shimmeringly beautifully in the sun. The outdoor sequences in the film, workers toiling at the construction site or bathing in a stream revel in the plein air beauty of natural light.

Jara Sofija Ostan and Mina Svajger: intimacy that is both alluring and suffocating

The role of music in the film also is a clue to the ambivalence with which Djurkić regards beauty, both sacred and profane. Nearly all of the choir's songs are paeans to the Almighty. They are beautiful, yet practiced and rote. True aural beauty is experienced only once in the film by Lucija when she happens upon a sextet of nuns singing in glory to God. The open hearted beauty of their singing reflects the nuns' inner devotion, something the members of the choir cannot approach. This sequence also sets up the extraordinary last shot of the film in which Lucija feeds upon grapes as Sonic Youth perform the gleefully blasphemous song that provides the film's title. Earlier, Ana Maria tells Lucija that they must eat sour grapes as expiation for their sins, but, by film's end, she has been revealed as a false prophet. Lucija, now outside of the web of her sinister peers, can enjoy the fruit and her solitude for their own sake. She may not adhere to the strictures of a holy order, but she has learned that the world is awash in sin. This is something Sonic Youth, no strangers to Catholic guilt, convey also. The key line in the song Little Trouble Girls is "...I'm really bad." Once an individual has accepted that man is born in sin, that knowledge is liberating whether one is seeking expiation or not.
               

Ruslan and Ludmila

                Natalya Petrova                 

Aleksandr Ptushko's Ruslan and Ludmila, from 1972, is an epic Russian fantasy film. It is an adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's fairy tale in verse which catapulted him to fame in 1820. The film is fairly faithful to the original poem, excising only a minor subplot and a number of ironic asides. Ptushko, who started as an animator, has been compared to everyone from Walt Disney to Mario Bava, but I think the best analogy is Ray Harryhausen. Like Harryhausen, Ptushko is a wizard in regards to design and practical effects, but is rather stodgy in the handling of his players. At times, Ruslan and Ludmila is as static as an opera production. This was Ptushko's final picture after a near half century career of fantastical films.

The film opens in a  castle in Kiev where Prince Vladimir is announcing the betrothal of his daughter Princess Ludmila (Natalya Petrova) to her beloved, the military hero Ruslan (Valeri Kozinets). However, an evil wizard, who we later learn is named Chernomor (Vladimir Fyodorov), snatches Ludmila away on her wedding night and imprisons her in his psychedelic lair. The decor of which is totally flip city, including a garden (above) which resembles a frosted H.R. Puffnstuf terrarium with stalagmites. Ruslan and three other less suitable suitors are tasked with rescuing Ludmila. Despite a tiger, evil henchmen, a wicked sorceress, the decapitated head of a giant and treachery, Ruslan accomplishes the heroic task while finding time to repel a Pecheneg army from the gates of Kiev. This hero's journey ends with Ruslan and Ludmila pledging their troth. 

Valeri Kozinets and Natalya Petrova

Ruslan and Ludmila lumbers along at a slow pace during the course of its 150 minutes. Viewers over ten may experience a soporific effect at times, but the film's longueurs have a benefit or two. The film's dialogue is largely dubbed and this, along with its slow pace, brings out the musicality of Pushkin's verse. There are also moments when individuals and choruses burst into song. Tikhon Khrennikov's stirring score helps bind together this pokey film without alluding to Glinka's opera. The accumulated aural effects helps turn the flick into a hymn to Russian nationalism, much like Alexander Nevsky and many other Soviet films. That Kiev is the citadel of Russian pride in the film has an extra resonance amidst Putin's invasion of the Ukraine. Since the founding of the first Slavic state Kievan Rus', around 900 CE or so, Kiev has been viewed as a part of the Motherland in the mind's eyes of Russian nationalists. This is further amplified by the status of Pushkin as the preeminent Russian author in his homeland. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and others may have gotten more ballyhoo in the West, but Pushkin is, rightly, revered in Russia as the father of modern Russian literature. All subsequent Russian authors are in his debt, as Dostoyevsky acknowledged in his famous 1880 speech about Pushkin.

There is an important aspect of Ruslan and Ludmila that may escape non-Russophiles. The evil wizard Chernomor's power lies in his beard. All Ruslan has to do is chop it off and the wizard is helpless. Now, as with Samson, one can look at Chernomor's bristles as a symbol of virility and potency, but there is a specific Slavic slant to this symbol. Peter the Great, the first Tsar to look to the West as a model of progress, instituted a controversial beard tax during his reign because he thought beards symbolized Russian backwardness. This was one of many examples of the tug of war in the Russian psyche between Western progressivism and traditional Russian nationalism. Pushkin was particularly sensitive to this tension. One of his best poems, The Bronze Horseman, culminates with a statue of Peter the Great chasing the narrator like a hell hound on his trail. Ruslan and Ludmila succeeds primarily as spectacle, but it contains a multitude of signifiers that shed light on the Russian character. The Deaf Crocodile disc looks spiffy.

Vladimir Fyodorov

                                       

High Time

Blake Edwards' High Time is a simple minded Bing Crosby vehicle that Edwards transforms into a pop tone poem of color and music. The story of the film is oft repeated dreck: a successful middle-aged businessman enrolls in college to see what he missed by not getting his sheepskin. This is a tale that has been told many a time in the cinema, the Rodney Dangerfield starrer Back to School has virtually the same plot. Garson Kanin is credited with the story and the Waldman brothers (The Party, The Return of the Pink Panther) the screenplay. The project was first pitched as a Gary Cooper vehicle, but then tailored for Der Bingle. He plays Harvey Howard, owner of a chain of "smokehouse" restaurants. We first see him being let off at college by his disapproving twenty something children. However, Harvey instantly bonds with his dorm mates, played by Fabian, Richard Beymer, and Patrick Adiarte.

The trio along with the always welcome Tuesday Weld are twisting away to Harvey's le jazz hot records when they meet. Edwards shoots the interiors theatrically. Transition sequences are titled cartoons with student extras performing like stagehands. The bright colors.and geometric patterns are repeated as a motif. Static scenes of singing and dialogue are alternated with spasms of choreographed action that verges on dance. Bing, Fabian, and the gang warbling "It Come Upon a Midnight Clear" in front of a white Christmas tree is juxtaposed with an antic snowball fight. The morning routine of the dorm mates is fast cranked like a silent comedy. Edwards treats the thin plot as a revue, a series of skits to be enlivened and united by color, movement, and music. There is no effort to move Bing into the age of rock and roll. He and the kids are listening to Henry Mancini's version of big band jazz not Elvis and Bo Diddley. There is no attempt at realism in this mild fantasy, which ends with Crosby "flying" over his graduation, and that is why Mancini's vivid score does more than any element of this piece of pop ephemera to hold it together.

Tuesday Weld and Bing Crosby

The cartoon like approach that Edwards employs, similar to Frank Tashlin, is not only appropriate to the featherweight nature of High Time, but also to the demands of making a Technicolor picture in Cinemascope. As in a lot of 'scope pictures, characterization takes second place to spectacle: in this case, sporting events, bonfires, hay rides, separate dormitories, and phone booth stuffing (look it up, kids). Bing is the same as ever, contentedly coasting along. Beymer is more spritely than usual: an Edwards effect. Weld's part is a boy crazy cliche, she even flirts with Bing, but she is always peaches and cream to me. Fabian is hopeless, but I think he was a better actor than Rick Nelson. As a crooner, he was pretty lousy, maybe the worst pin-up singer ever except for the terminally flat Bobby Sherman. Fabian sings a few bars of "Foggy Dew", a tip of the hat to the burgeoning folk movement I guess, but the number is thankfully truncated. Fabian is especially unconvincing as a basketball point guard, but I watched his ineptitude wistfully. Soon, he and the other payola assisted teen idols, like Frankie Avalon and James Darren, who were manufactured to be the new Elvis after the King was drafted, were to be swept away by the rising tide of Beatlemania.

Nicole Maurey plays Bing's romantic interest, a divorced French professor. Maurey had a wide ranging career (from Diary of a Country Priest to The Day of the Triffids) and had teamed with Crosby for Little Boy Lost, but the sexual chemistry between the two is zilch in High Time. The relationship and the hit tune Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen concocted to celebrate it ("The Second Time Around") seems tailor made to burnish Crosby's image after he had recently remarried. Though he had been a romantic idol in the 1930s, by 1960 the torch had been passed to Fabian and his ilk and Crosby was better off playing a priest. There are other aspects of the film that have dated badly. At one point, Crosby has to attend a faux antebellum ball, in drag, to satisfy a requirement of his fraternity initiation. The ball seems a remnant of the pernicious romanticism of the noble lost cause view of the Confederacy. Crosby is game, but this farcical transvestism would seem better suited to a clown like Danny Kaye or Jerry Lewis.

Nicole Maurey, Bing, and Tuesday

However, when viewed within the context of Blake Edwards' career, the transvestism in High Time can be seen as a consistent leitmotif that was explored most fully in Victor/Victoria. Likewise the choreographed physical schtick that is the highlight of High Time led to the hijinks of the Pink Panther films, The Great Race, and The Party. The contributions of editor Robert Simpson and choreographer Miriam Nelson helps ensure that High Time is a motion picture that really moves. Fans of vintage television will enjoy seeing the contributions of Gavin Macleod and Yvonne Craig. 

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Andy Lau

Tsui Hark's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (henceforth Detective Dee 1) is a relatively diverting martial-arts spectacle from 2010. A major figure in Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s, Mr. Hark has amassed over fifty directorial credits and even more as a producer. Most of what I've seen of his work is gaseous and over blown with little characterization or thematic impact. Detective Dee 1 is greatly helped by the efforts of the director of its action sequences, Sammo Kam-Bo Hung, who started as a stunt man in 1969 and who gives Detective Dee the palpable thump it needs. The efforts of action sequence directors in martial arts films is akin to that of the choreographers, like Jack Cole, who staged the song and dance numbers in Hollywood musicals; often without credit.

The scenario for Detective Dee 1 is a jumbled tale of intrigue set during a fancifully depicted Tang dynasty. An advisor to the Empress (Carina Lau) spontaneously combusts and, soon, other characters suffer the same fate. Detective Dee (Andy Lau), who has been languishing in jail after a trumped up treason charge, is given the task of finding the culprits behind these mysterious deaths. Amidst a background warring clans, Dee learns the truism of every half-assed mystery: no one is to be trusted. So, the plot is hooey, but the numerous action sequences are propulsive. A film like Detective Dee 1 is designed to appeal to the eight year old in all of us. How else can you explain a flick in which a character is named Donkey Wang with Scabies? Judged purely as a popcorn picture, Detective Dee 1 is better crafted and more exhilarating than, say, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.             

Mata-Hari

            

George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari, from 1931, is one of the more turgid of MGM's vehicles for Greta Garbo. Garbo stars as the titular spy, but no effort was made to be historically accurate; which is a pity because it is quite a story. Four (listed) screenwriters concocted a hoary yarn with unmemorable dialogue. The espionage angle of the film is its weakest aspect, pure codswallop. What's left is your typical Garbo triangle with an older lover (Lionel Barrymore) and a younger one (Roman Novarro). Barrymore is pretty good as a wheezing donkey of male impotence. Novarro, born in Durango, is supposed to be playing a Russian flyer, but wisely doesn't attempt an accent. Though ridiculous in his role, he is good at shining his puppy love eyes at la Garbo. Garbo is great, natch, but I was disconcerted by her pronouncing the country, "Rush-ee-ah." Lewis Stone and Karen Morley are also good, but under utilized.

Classic Hollywood was often an echo chamber and Mata-Hari is a good example of this. It seems a response to Paramount's success with the exoticism of the Dietrich and Sternberg, nicking the cabaret sections from Morocco and the fatalistic spy shenanigans of Dishonored.

Mata-Hari, like Dishonored, ends with its heroine facing a firing squad. However, Fitzmaurice's static visual style is like flat beer compared to the bubbly champagne of Josef von Sternberg's play of light and shadow. This despite the striking work of cinematographer William Daniels whose credits include The Shop Around the Corner and many Garbo features. I did enjoy the wigged out costumes and Orientalist set designs, but their appeal is mainly to a camp sensibility. Garbo provokes more mystery when she turns her face into a mask, as during the finale of Queen Christina, than when she does a bump and grind around a pagan idol in a sheer outfit. Less is sometimes more. 

Nearly all copies of this film, including the Warners Archive disc I viewed, contain a truncated version of the film released after the institution of the Production code. A complete version has been found in Brussels with about three more minutes, mostly of Garbo shimmying lasciviously and seducing Novarro in a see-through negligee. Sounds great, but I don't think these sequences would ultimately redeem Mata-Hari. 

A mugshot of the real Mata-Hari

Hamnet

Chloe Zhao, Paul Mescal, and Jessie Buckley

My reactions to Chloé Zhao's Hamnet find me in a sea of relativity. It is a fine literary adaptation, but fine can be a limiting adjective. It is a better film than Train Dreams, at least the characters in Hamnet have dirt under their fingernails, but Denis Johnson is a superior writer and storyteller compared to Maggie O'Farrell. Ms. O'Farrell collaborated with Ms. Zhao on the screenplay and it hews closely to the novel. The only thing that I especially missed was the opening chapter in which a ship docks in London and a rat escapes to gift Britain with the plague, but I can certainly understand why it was dropped. The film is well cast, it is refreshing to see a Anne Hathaway (here called Agnes, as in her father's will) who is actually older than her mate. Mescal is good with his readings, but I would have preferred more of a hint of rascality in his portrayal of the Bard of Avon. O'Farrell's book centers on Agnes, as does the film, and Jessie Buckley is up to the challenge. She is always capable and intelligent in her choices. What has earned her awards this time is that awards are given not to the best performance, but to the most performance. Buckley gets to howl at the moon in pain and grief twice in Hamnet, but I am a little dubious of the notion of trauma being alchemized into great art. 

Countering the calumnies visited upon her by Frank Harris and others, O'Farrell and Zhao turn Agnes into an Earth Mother Courage roaming the forest searching for wild herbs and roots with her pet hawk. Zhao is able to derive a chthonic pull from Agnes' journeys into the forest primeval. On the whole, though, this is Zhao's least distinctive film. Most of the flaws of this film stem from the book which suffers from the misperception that the Elizabethans were just like us. The concerns of Hamnet owe more to 2020. The technological and moral latitude of the Elizabethan age was a world apart from ours. If you want to get an idea of what is missing in Hamnet's portrait of this world, I'd two Elizabethan novels by Anthony Burgess: Nothing Like the Sun (in which Shakespeare is the protagonist) and A Dead Man in Deptford (in which Christopher Marlowe is the protagonist).

All the Moons

Haizea Carneros

One of only a hundred or so movies in the Basque language, Igor Legarreta's All the Moons is a vampire flick that spans seventy years of Spanish history from 1876 to 1936. It eschews many of the tropes of cheesier vampire flicks, like fangs and stakes through the heart. Though there is a little body horror, the film hews closer to magical realism than outright gore. The young Haizea Carneros plays Amaia, a prepubescent girl who we first meet living in a Church orphanage. Soon, as a result of a stray cannon ball produced by the Third Carlist War, Amaia is buried under rubble and looks like a goner. Amaia is saved or, rather, changed into an immortal by a middle aged female vampire (Itziar Ituño) desperate for a daughter. She acts as a surrogate mother and schools Amaia on the diet and nocturnal proclivities of her fellow vampires. Madre and daughter are soon separated by the requisite angry townsfolk with torches. 

Amai lives alone in the forests of Northern Spain for a time, slowly ameliorating the physical limits of her vampiric state. However, she reconnects with humanity in the form of a kindly dairy farmer named Candido (Josean Bengoetxea). Amaia steps on a wolf trap set by Candido to protect his flock, but ends up living with him until his inevitable demise. Amaia is introduced to his fellow villagers by Candido and initially embraced, but the two have to head for the hills after Amaia upchucks the Host during Mass. Anyway, at film's end, Amaia confronts her cave dwelling Madre who is all too willing to sacrifice all for her gal.

The Spain of this film is one where all relationships have been upended by civil unrest.There is not an intact family in the flick. All the Moons has gorgeous photography, but Leggarreta gives the film a palpable tang. From having Amaia peel off her dead skin to ending the film with her first period, Leggarreta foregrounds the physicality of this fable. This prevents the film from seeming too genteel or picturesque. All three leads are superb, particularly Ms. Carneros who is in every scene of the film. It is a testament to Mr. Leggarreta's skill with his players the he could get such a memorable performance from one so young. All the Moons was released in Spain in 2020, but was never released theatrically in the US. I viewed the Shudder disc and it is a handsome product. A good but not great film, All the Moons is available on many streaming platforms. 

              

Quick Takes, April 2026

Masaki Suda

One of the better thrillers released in the US in 2025, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud is the story of Ryôsuke (Masaki Suda), a small-time chiseler who resells dubious goods on the internet. Karma strikes back at Ryôsuke in the form of disgruntled buyers who unite online and then proceed to stalk him. The aura of paranoia and distrust is conveyed through the queasily sick grey/blue palette employed. As in classic noir, no one is to be trusted. When Ryôsuke finds an ally at the end of a classic finale, it is with the shared knowledge that they both are damned.

Jalmari Helander's Sisu: Road to Revenge is a worthy sequel to the 2022 film. This film is a pared down action and chase film, more akin to a graphic novel than to the mythos of the the first film. Jorma Tommila is back as the resilient protagonist. Stephen Lang, as Tommila's Soviet nemesis, lends his grizzled visage to the proceedings and is a snug fit. Like the original, this film is almost totally devoid of dialogue.

Given its subject matter, Paul McCartney and Wings' musical adventures in the decade following the break-up of The Beatles, Morgan Neville's Man on the Run is a relatively brisk and entertaining documentary. Neville wisely doesn't get bogged down into a rundown of the minutiae of Macca and company's various albums. No sane person wants the whole story on Wild Life or Red Rose Speedway or London Town. Instead, we see more of McCartney and the various iterations of his band onstage or frolicking backstage and in the studio. Despite inane lyrics and some of the worst haircuts of the 20th century, the doc does provide a good portrait of the pleasant, if dippy cute Beatle. Even though this is an authorized biodoc, I was happy that discordant notes were allowed, particularly Nick Lowe's putdown of Marry Had a Little Lamb; McCartney's second worst single.

I was a fan of the series, but the new film, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is a slight disappointment. Tom Harper's direction is spirited enough, but show runner and screenwriter Steven Knight seems bereft of new ideas. Cillian Murphy is always great as the stone-faced Tommy Shelby, but too many interesting characters are now dead and the new ones are not as memorable. Only Barry Keoghan as Tommy's Gypsy son strikes any sparks with Murphy. Rebecca Ferguson is disastrously cast as a palm reading Romani, but Knight's female characters have almost always been under drawn. The mystical aspects of this installment are beyond Mr. Knight. The film attempts to retell the pagan ritual of the new king dispatching and displacing an old one, but the tale is not as grounded as in previous installments. Start with the old episodes instead.

Danny Huston's Mr. North, from 1988, is an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's last novel, Theophilus North. North seemingly has the gift of healing and entrances Newport society of the 1920s. Huston captures Wilder's magically realistic tone, but also his vapidity. The result verges on Merchant/Ivory light, pleasant, but in no way memorable. Huston is most at sea in his direction of a comic chase sequence. However, he assembled a crack cast: Anthony Edwards, Robert Mitchum, Harry Dean Stanton, Angelica Huston, Virginia Madsen, David Warner, and Katharine Houghton. Acting laurels go to Mary Stuart Masterson. The booby prize goes to Tammy Grimes. The film includes rare appearances by Christopher Durang, Cleveland Amory, and Marietta Tree.

Pierre Morel's The Gunman, from 2015, is a feeble action film with Sean Penn as a contract killer. The picture is very loosely based on Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Prone Gunman, an icy and compact noir. Three listed screenwriters, including Mr. Penn, have added international settings and a romantic triangle. The bloat reduces this to a flashy vanity project. A good cast is largely wasted: Ray Winstone, Jasmine Trinca, Javier Bardem, Mark Rylance, and Idris Elba.

Cédric Jimenez's The Man with the Iron Heart is the umpteenth and worst rendition of the 1942 assassination of SS Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. Based on Laurent Binet's superb novel HHhH, the film offers a cursory and jumbled version of fascinating historical events. Key incidents, like the Night of the Long Knives, are presented without context or proper explanation. A fine cast is stranded in a waxworks. The story is fascinating, but interested parties are advised to read Binet's book or view such previous cinematic versions as Hangmen Also Die! or Anthropoid. The most compelling aspect of The Man with the Iron Heart is Stephen Graham's performance as Heinrich Himmler.

Cloud