Apart From You

            Mitsuko Yoshikawa and Sumiko Mizukubo                

Mikio Naruse's Apart from You is the best of the silent melodramas he directed in the early 1930s. The plot of this 1933 flick concerns aging geisha Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) and her disapproving teenage son Yoshio (Akio Isono). The sullen Yoshio is skipping school and slipping into juvenile delinquency. The possibility of redemption is embodied in Terugiku (Sumiko Yoshikawa), a younger colleague of Kikue who has known, and pined for, Yoshio since childhood. Terugiku tries to steer Yoshio to the straight and narrow, but is hampered by a toxic home life. Does Yoshio return to school? Does Terugiku succumb to the lecherous advances of an older man or does true love prevail in the end? I'll never tell, but Apart from You's ambivalent ending moved me.

The film is superior to other Naruse film of this period partly because there is no child on hand to be run over in the next to last reels, as in Flunky, Work Hard! and No Blood Relation. Apart from such melodramatic contrivances, Apart from You benefits from some directorial restraint. Naruse was fond of dollying in and out from his players to add punctuation. In some of his features from this period, he employs this technique so much that I felt seasick, but Naruse employs it only once in Apart from You. That said, Naruse shares with his colleague Ozu a dazzling grasp of technique at this point in film history. He also shares with Ozu a way with his players. The two lead females of Apart from You are particularly sublime. Like all master directors, the details of Naruse's work fall more into place the more you see of his work. Apart from You shares many of the same players and themes in his other films of this period. As Neil Young said, in reply to a heckler who said all his songs sounded the same, "It's all one song."

Caught by the Tides

Zhao Tao       

Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides is film that spans two decades in the Northern Chinese city of Datong. Zhao Tao, Jia's wife and muse, plays the part of Qiao Qiao who we meet juggling multiple jobs (singer, dancer, model, and bar girl) amidst the gig economy of the year 2000. She has a boyfriend, Bin (Li Zhubin), but he is her manager and the relationship dynamics between them resemble that of whore and pimp. They part when Bin's shady dealings catch up with him. They reunite in 2022 in a China recovering from the COVID pandemic. Bin spies that it is Qiao Qiao checking out his grocery items, but their reunion proves more bitter than sweet. Qiao Qiao has moved on emotionally and the finale has her doing literally just that.

Despite the curdled romance at the film's center, Caught by the Tides is more a meditation on progress, for good and bad, in 21st century China than a fictive narrative. Jia was able to assemble the film, in which his characters really do age, from documentary footage, abortive films, and outtakes from other projects. The film feels haphazard, it leaps about through time and space shifting from grainy video in the Academy ratio to gorgeous widescreen film. Cuts are predicated on poetic links rather than plot development. The use of different modes of travel in the film, air, rail, boat, and road, denote this as a film about life's passage. The soundtrack ranges from Shanxi opera to Chinese punk rock: the only constant is change. We visit an area not basking in the lap of China's economic miracle. Rather, it is an area and culture that has been subsumed since the construction of the 3 Gorges Dam. One of the best films released in the US in 2025 containing a performance for the ages by Zhao Tao.

Envy

Ben Stiller

I was not even aware that Barry Levinson's Envy existed until I stumbled upon a DVD of the film at my local library. Apparently, this 2004 film was such an ignominious flop that it left not a trace on the public consciousness. The two major film companies responsible for its financing had so little faith in it after its box office demise that it never had a release on disc until Shout Factory, champions of pop culture errata, snapped it up. I decided to give it a chance based on the cast alone: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, and Christopher Walken. Alas, the film is direly unfunny. Stiller and Black play SoCal neighbors who work at unfulfilling jobs at a 3M plant. Weisz and Poehler are underutilized as "the wives". Black invents an aerosol spray that eliminates animal waste dubbed Vapoorize. That is the level of the humor. The film's primary focus is on Stiller's resentment over his friend's success. 

There are moments of humor, but they are few and far between. Walken fares best because he is well cast as an eccentric barfly. Black is underused. The only moment that captures his comic energy is an infomercial in which he pitches his product. Stiller is really the lead here. Leon Redbone contributes a song cycle reminiscent of Jonathan Richman's efforts in There's Something About Mary, but comic lightning did not strike twice. Stiller has a good moment telling off his boss, but pratfalls and physical schtick, which the Farrelly brothers handled well in ...Mary, are not Barry Levinson's forte. He is more adept at verbal comedy linked to characterization and characterization is extremely thin in Envy. Stiller and Levinson's attempts to milk physical comedy from a dead horse flop badly. It seems to me when Levinson ventures outside his native Baltimore, the results have been feeble. Avoid Envy.

A Woman of the World

                       Pola Negri and Chester Conklin                    

Malcolm St. Clair's A Woman of the World, released in 1925, is an amusing fish out of water trifle than runs only 70 minutes. The Tubi stream is only so-so in terms of visual fidelity and sharpness, a pity since Bert Glennon (The Scarlet Empress, Stagecoach) manned the camera, but it still gives us a chance to see a relatively neglected silent. The film was based on Carl Van Vechten's recent novel, The Tattooed Countess. Tasked with turning this into a vehicle for one of Paramount's big stars, Pola Negri, screenwriter Pierre Collings dropped the age of the Countess by two decades and, thankfully, retained her tattoo. Morrie Ryskind was responsible for the intertitles which sardonically lampoons the narrow mindedness of the Babbitts and Babettes of small town America.

The film opens with a prologue on the Riviera in which Negri finds her husband, a no account count, in flagrante delicto. To get away from her troubles, Pola travels to America to visit his long lost cousin, who turns out to be...Chester Conklin(?!). Conklin, five years removed from Mack Sennett, was still the best second banana in the business and his rapport with Negri is priceless. His character, like all of the men in the film's fictional town of Maple Valley, is suspicious of her foreign ways, but becomes a puddle in her presence. The scene in which he reveals his own tattoo to Negri is priceless. The exoticism of Negri unleashes neurotic and erotic currents in Maple Valley. Two men fall in love with her, the most significant being the local DA (Holmes Herbert), a bluenose with a fanatical zeal for reform. They meet cute when he calls her a loose woman, she is smoking a cigarette after all, and he tells her to leave town. The road to true love is rocky and not helped by the local gossip mongers busy knitting on their porches. Pola ends up confronting the DA at a city council meeting brandishing a whip for a finale that inevitably leads to a clinch and a just married sign. 

Pola Negri: bangs were big in the flapper era

Malcolm St. Clair's career, like Ms. Negri's, nosedived in the sound era. His direction here is simple and elegant, his focus more on actorly byplay than panoramas. He rarely moves his camera and seems fond of close-ups of telling details: hands and balls of yarn. The one pan in the film tracks a bit of gossip as it goes from one end of the room to the other. Negri is playful and game. She suggests a real woman behind the guise of a vamp. I never have cared for Holmes Herbert, too much of a throwback to the 19th century for me, but he fits his uptight role. Charles Emmett Mack plays a younger admirer, the kind leading ladies of the day ultimately reject because they are only a boy. He is promising, but died, prematurely and tragically in an auto accident in 1927. All in all though, A Woman of the World is a delight.

Magical Mystery Tour versus The White Bus

Fab Four gone flab

I first saw The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour in 1978 or so, a scratchy and wan print at a midnight showing. After seeing the similar tour bus driven The White Bus, also originally released in 1967, I thought to give it a another chance. Was it still the witless psychedelic farrago that I remembered? Alas, yes. I guess it was too much to expect that the pop music darlings of that age could make an interesting film, but did they even try? The project seems hastily conceived and shot. Phantasmagoric moments as the bus tours the English countryside are interspersed with amateurish videos of the band's new material. The music, except for the truly mad I Am the Walrus, is subpar Fabs; the barrel scrapings of their psychedelic era. The only thing I can say positive about the film is that it is a link from The Goon Show to Monty Python. At least the band had good taste in genuine English eccentrics like Ivor Cutler and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Lindsay Anderson's The White Bus mines a similar vein of English eccentricism in glorious black and white. The Beatles' film had been inspired by Ken Kesey's adventures with his busload of merry pranksters. No such foreign or lysergic influence pervades Anderson's film. The short, 47 minutes, film was made to be part of a portmanteau project that would also include short films by Tony Richardson and Karl Reisz that would prove not to be. Shot in 1965, The White Bus had a brief release in 1967, but has languished in obscurity since. The film was written by Shelaugh Delaney, edited by Kevin Brownlow, and stars Patricia Healey. Healey plays a depressed London clerk working in a Brutalist building who embarks upon a train ride in a very gray London. The unnamed she gets hit on by a bowler caricature of an aristo, but cheers up when entertained by the antics of a cadre of Manchester United fans. The group sing-a-long is more winning and better shot than the one in The Beatles' flick.

Patricia Healey

The gal disembarks in Manchester which looks even more sooty and sinister than London. Happily, a double decker tour bus happens by and our heroine hops on. The passengers are a mix of English types, international travelers, and the Lord Mayor and his Macebearer, both dressed in full regalia. The characterizations are less exaggerated than in Magical Mystery Tour and the whole enterprise looks great, probably at the cost of The Beatles' catering budget. The groups tours industrial sites, museums, gardens, weaving centers, cake factories and witness Anthony Hopkins sing, very briefly, Resolution der Kommunarden, a Brecht poem about the Paris Commune of 1871 set to music by fellow traveler Hans Eisler. The picture occaisionally explodes in sequences of color, as in Anderson's If..., but nothing should be read into this. Anderson admitted he did so in desperation. He would use whatever precious film that was gifted to him by hook or crook. The film addresses alienation from a secure distance. Anderson pokes fun at English nationalism, class strictures, and the Church: all safe and easy targets. The Manchester buildings still bombed out from the Second World War leave more of an impact on the mind's eye.

Despite its limitations, The White Bus, especially in comparison to Magical Mystery Tour, is a coherent and realized picture from a director with a true filmmaker's eye. Ms. Healey had a haphazard film career, including two cameos in subsequent Anderson films, but earned a moniker that many would envy, Mrs. Englebert Humperdinck. They were wed from 1964 till her death in 2021.

In memory of Erich Kuersten

Just Imagine

Maureen O'Sullivan and John Garrick

David Butler's Just Imagine is a justly neglected science fiction film from 1930.  The film is set in the far off future of 1980 in a world in which planes are the primary vehicles and numbers have replaced names. Marriage is dictated by the state which provides what little plot the film has. Lovebirds Maureen O'Sullivan (as LN-18) and John Garrick (as J-21) can't get a marriage license from the Politburo, so Garrick flies off to Mars to earn enough brownie points to wed his lady love. There, he encounters a planet of doppelgängers who alternately coddle and bruise him. There is also a refugee from 1930, played by vaudeville star El Johnson who specialized in ethnic (Swedish) humor, who is monikered 0 and serves no real purpose except to provide comic relief. Oh, as if things weren't bonky enough, there are musical numbers.

Joyzelle Joyner and John Garrick on Mars

The picture has the searing impact of a burlesque revue with jokes about the Volstead act included. The sets and costumes are endearingly gaga. The men's suits in the film's 1980 resemble maitre d's outfits at a French restaurant in Vegas. The tony dwellings of 1980 resemble the Art Deco look of the 20s and early 30s. Butler is a curiously lightweight director who was able to carve out a steady career in Hollywood despite helming a number of disasters like this one. He is able to create a few bold and startling images, Ms. O'Sullivan in close-up superimposed upon the surface of the earth or a passel of nekkid chorines (Pre-Code, baby) shimmying before their pagan idol, but the film doesn't really hold together. It resembles a night of vaudeville, alternating between comic and musical numbers. Neither Garrick nor Johnson were able to make much of an impact in their film careers and soon returned to the stage. I've never seen Ms. O'Sullivan look more beautiful, but she, like Garrick, gives a largely inane and callow performance. The second bananas, Marjorie White and Frank Albertson, fare much better. Ms. White was to die prematurely and tragically of an auto accident in 1935.

I would have enjoyed the film more if the songs had been better. The team of Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson were responsible for both the songs and the flimsy screenplay. They wrote some classic songs, like Bye Bye Blackbird, Has Anybody Seen My Gal ? and You're the Cream in My Coffee, but inspiration was lacking on this one. Most of the songs are light ballads designed for Garrick's tenor voice. They seem like knock-offs of the work of Sigmund Romberg, known for operettas like The Desert Song and The New Moon. Indeed, the drinking song in Just Imagine seems like a direct rip from the drinking song in Romberg's The Student Prince. Only the White and Albertson number, Never Swat a Fly, has any razzmatazz. Just Imagine is streaming on Tubi, if you are in the mood for a real Hollywood hallucination.

      

Father Sergius

                       

I cannot recommend the print of Father Sergius (Otets Sergiy) that is currently streaming on Tubi. It seems to be the product of a Soviet re-release from the 1930s. The quality is murky and the film image seems pared down. The film is certainly truncated in length, eighty minutes of a film that was originally nearly two hours, but options are limited. Mubi ran a print of similarly shortened length a few years back. There are purportedly full length versions circulating on disc, but they are of dodgy provenance.

However, the film is of both artistic and historical value and I could not pry my eyes away. The film was begun during Kerensky regime, but not released until after the Bolsheviks had consolidated their seizure of power in 1918. Tsarist law forbade the depiction of priests onscreen, so this was the first adaptation of a Tolstoi short story that had been published posthumously. There have been subsequent versions, including an adaptation by the Taviani brothers in 1990 which transposed the action to Italy. Father Sergius, the film, adheres fairly closely to the arc of the original story. We watch the title character age from a hot-tempered aristocratic soldier to an aged holy man who embraces abject humility in Siberia. The story is typical of late Tolstoi, a predictable morality play tracing one man's spiritual regeneration; a story akin to that of the Buddha. Prince Kasatsky, the future Father Sergius, is on the eve of his wedding to a well-connected Countess whom he has pined for when he finds out that she has served as the mistress of Tsar Nicholas 1. Before you can say Platon Karataev, the prince has renounced worldly desires and status and donned the robes of a priest. Through the years his devout demeanor attracts followers, as a slew of female temptresses try to snatch him from the straight and narrow. Eventually, he succumbs to the charms of one of them and abandons his church. In order to fully embrace humility, he becomes a wandering beggar which leads to exile in Siberia. Thus endeth the lesson.

Yakov Protazanov was the primary director of the project, but after he fell ill Alexandre Volkoff, who adapted the Tolstoi story for the screenplay, filled in. Whoever was responsible, the direction is sturdy, if not astonishing. Foreground and background are contrasted for some nice contrapuntal effects. Images of Sergius' betrothed are superimposed over his meagre room to show that he has not fully escaped worldly desires. There are a few rickety 45 degree pans, but they seem designed to do little except show off the sets. Whoever did the makeup seems overly fond of kohl.

The primary reason to see the film is the title role performance by Ivan Mosjoukine, the premier film actor of pre-Soviet Russia. He gives a bravura performance in which he ages from sixteen to sixty. Mosjoukine reminds me, in terms of looks and talent, of John Barrymore without the hamminess. Both Mosjoukine and Volkoff headed for exile in the West in 1920. They even collaborated on a few films in France. Mosjoukine had a brief stay in Hollywood, where he was trumpeted as the next Valentino, but the rise of the talkies cut his stay short. He will remain immortal because he was the actor Lev Kuleshov utilized to illustrate his celebrated effect.

1917: The Making of a Revolution

Maxim Gorky

I was taken aback by how much I enjoyed Stan Neumann's documentary 1917: The Making of a Revolution which is currently streaming on Tubi. I am mad keen on the Russian Revolution and will watch even the blandest collection of archival footage and talking heads. However, this doc has no newsreel footage or talking heads. It switches from expertly chosen still photographs to animation and footage of historic sites as they look in present day St. Petersburg. Neumann was born in the Czech Republic and lives in France. The 53 minutes length of this documentary makes me think that it was probably made for French television, but I could not pin this down for a fact.

The French title for the documentary gives a better idea of the scope of this film: Lénine -- Gorki, la révolution à contretemps. The film uses the polemical blasts and op-ed pieces by Lenin and Gorky to portray the dialectical push and pull of revolutionary ferment in 1917. This is not the best approach for an overview of the revolution, Trotsky is barely mentioned, but it serves well the constrictions of a film this length. What is here has great impact. The animated sections are lively, I particularly liked the breakdown of political parties in the style of Malevich's Suprematist Compositions. I also adored the use of Alexander Blok's poem The Twelve. The narrator recites passages as we glimpse Jury Annenkov's illustrations for the original edition which gives as much a flavor of 1917 in Petrograd as any period photo.

The clincher for me was the use of the great Denis Lavant to portray Gorky in his Italian exile. Lavant's passionate yet mellifluous readings of Gorky's Revolutionary era essays are beautiful. History comes alive. 

Blue Moon

Ethan Hawke

Blue Moon is a another winner from Richard Linklater and another testament to his handling of ensemble work from his players. That said, Robert Kaplow's script is centered entirely on Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, played by Ethan Hawke, on the most humiliating evening of his life. Kaplow, who wrote the script for Me and Orson Welles, foreshadows Hart's demise in a brief prologue. We then travel back months in time to the night in 1943 when Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! is making its New York debut to a rapturous reception. Hart, who had teamed with Rodgers for two decades before becoming increasingly drunken and unreliable, can't stomach sitting through the show. So, he repairs to a lovingly recreated Sardi's where the remainder of the film occurs. Rodgers and Hammerstein eventually arrive to toast their triumph, further nudging Hart towards despair and a relapse.

The downbeat and insular nature of the project is magnified by the closed in nature of the action. Instead of opening up what is essentially filmed theater, Linklater closes the action down as much as he can to reinforce our sense of Hart's claustrophobic debasement. Debasement is the key theme of the film. Even when Hart's muse (Margaret Qualley) confides to him about her deflowering, the story ends not with catharsis, but humiliation. Despite the downbeat nature of this picture, I actively enjoyed it. This is primarily due to Mr. Hawke's outstanding performance. Hawke not only captures the pathos of his character, but also his wit and warmth and that makes all the difference into keeping this flick from falling into morbidity. Hawke has always been a ridiculously talented actor, but this is most soulful effort.

Linklater and his editor, Sandra Adair, masterfully weave the staff of Sardi's around Hawke.  They act as a contrapuntal chorus to the tragic hero in a picture attuned both to Broadway melodies and the music of dialogue. I particularly relished Bobby Cannavale's ripostes and double takes as the bartender. I also enjoyed the contributions of Jonah Lees, Patrick Kennedy, Aisling O'Mara, and Caitríona Ennis. Decades of accumulating evidence has led to this conclusion, but Blue Moon further cements Linklater's reputation as an American master.