The Miracle Woman

Barbara Stanwyck

Frank Capra's The Miracle Woman is an uneven, yet ultimately effective 1931 drama. It reunites Capra with Barbara Stanwyck who were on a winning streak for Harry Cohn and Columbia Pictures. The picture was based on a 1927 play, entitled Bless You Sister, by John Meehan and, significantly, future Capra collaborator Robert Riskin. The material was adapted by Jo Swerling, and functions as a critique of evangelism, equating it with  sports, carnivals, medicine shows, and the like. The main inspiration for the play was evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson whose "disappearance" was the most sensational news story of 1926. 1927 was also the year Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry. Since the birth of the Republic, each new spiritual awakening has elicited a backlash by America's writers and intellectuals. I just finished reading Hawthorne's superb The Blithedale Romance, published in 1852, which pictures American spiritualists as confidence men and scoundrels. The song has remained the same.

The picture opens with Stanwyck dressing down her father's congregation after they have defrocked him. This provides her an ideal opportunity to display her moxie and passion as an actress. A traveling carny named Hornsby(Sam Hardy) senses her charisma and takes her under his wing. Soon, she has been monikered "Sister Florence Fallon" and is ministering to a large congregation. Sister Fallon's show features stage lighting, a large band, a choir, and even caged lions. Shills are employed by Hornsby to fan the flames of the fanatics. The razzmatazz and ballyhoo employed by Hornsby brings lucrative rewards. The backstage aspect of The Miracle Woman is what is most saltily attractive about the picture. Hardy, in particular, excels at the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue that Riskin would become renowned for. Hardy amassed over eighty film credits before his premature death in 1935.

Stanwyck and David Manners

Unfortunately, the romantic angle of the picture nearly sinks it. David Manners, as a blind veteran named John Carson who wins the evangelist's heart and moves her towards redemption, is so stiff and lifeless he resembles a two ton anchor. Manners had some success playing Jonathan Harker in the 1931 hit Dracula, but his lack of affect would doom his career in films. The romantic ardor generated by Stanwyck and Manners is zilch. Manners was a stiff, but I'm not sure who could have redeemed this idiotic role. Carson wins over Stanwyck by employing racial epithets, a doll named Sambo, a toy clown that plays The Farmer in the Dell, and, most heinous of all, ventriloquism. The mind reels. 

However, there are moments of genius that redeem the picture. A good example is Capra's introduction of Carson: a four shot sequence briskly tossed off, but containing a trove of information about the character. Carson is seen in the background of the shot telling an apartment dweller, separated by a narrow alley from Carson's pad, to turn her radio, tuned to the Sister Fallon show, down. Then there is an overhead shot from the roof of Carson's apartment showing his head sticking out his window asking for quiet. The shot, which will be crucially repeated, shows how narrow the alley is separating Carson's building from his neighbor. The shot emphasizes the reduced circumstances of those living in these tenements. Capra then cuts to a head on shot of Carson closing the window. The next shot, from the inside of his apartment, shows Carson in profile with a Harvard pennant in the background. Why, the audience must ask, is an Ivy League grad living in penury. We soon learn that Carson was a World War 1 aviator who lost his sight in the conflict. He has struggled to make a living as a songwriter, but his failure compels him to attempt suicide. Capra repeats the overhead shot that now augurs doom. Instead, Carson hears Sister Fallon's voice urging her listeners to combat despair and never quit on life. The rest of the film pretty much writes itself. 

Stanwyck's diaphanous stage outfits are a wonder of Pre-Code cinema. The finale in which Sister Fallon's tabernacle is engulfed in a conflagration is a fiery ending that calls to mind the title of one of Capra's 1932 pictures: American Madness.

The Shrouds

Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger            

David Cronenberg's The Shrouds opened in competition at Cannes in 2024, but struggled to find a distributor. It eventually had a cursory theatrical run in the US this year. Critics were largely receptive, but this is a very personal film best appreciated by diehard fans of the director and writer. I must say I am a diehard Cronenberg fan and believe The Shrouds is one of the best pictures of the year, but I'm sure it will appear inscrutable to some. For those seeking cinematic adrenalin, this film is a hard pass. However, as with Crimes of the Future, I savored Cronenberg's serene, yet passionate meditation on mortality. The film is funnier than almost all recent comedies and sexier than any erotic thriller in many a moon. Cronenberg's perversity does not align with mass taste, but it is his singularity that is his genius.

The Shrouds was inspired by the death of Cronenberg's wife and features Vincent Cassel (done up to look like the director) as a Cronenberg stand-in named Karsh. Karsh is an industrial filmmaker and entrepreneur who is bent on opening a chain of cemeteries named GraveTech. The company wraps corpses in the titular shrouds that enables video of the decaying corpse to be streamed on the screens on the tombstone and on your phone if you buy the app. Karsh is haunted, literally, by the death of his wife (Diane Kruger), Becca. The first image of the film is of her moldering body in a dream of Karsh's. In the dream, he is literally separated from her and screams. Cronenberg cuts to another nightmarish vision, with Karsh, mouth open again, writhing in his dentist's chair. His dentist tells him his mouth is in bad shape with the diagnosis being the effects of his grief. We are firmly in the body horror territory which Cronenberg mapped out under The Shape of Rage rubric in The Brood. Karsh is devoted to GraveTech not for wealth or fame, but because a perverse romantic obsession drives him; a self-reflexive admission from the auteur.

Vincent Cassel and Guy Pearce

Cronenberg has never been fully appreciated for his black humor. The first major sequence in The Shrouds is a prime example with Karsh involved in a disastrous blind date set up by his AI avatar, voiced by Ms. Kruger and appropriately named Honey. Karsh decides to host the date at his flagship cemetery which boasts a gourmet restaurant. I suppose a goth chick might find this setting romantic, but Karsh's date, deftly played by Jennifer Dale, is appalled, especially when Karsh takes her to the graveyard to see the video of Becca's skeleton. Karsh does attract other female attention, though. He has a barbed and charged relationship with Becca's sister, Terry, also played by Ms. Kruger. Then there is Soo-Min Szabo ( a superb Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a Hungarian business man who is interested in opening a GraveTech franchise in Budapest. However, her designs on Karsh may be more sinister than romantic.

The picture changes tone, slightly, when Karsh discovers that his cemetery has been vandalized and that the video feeds of the corpses, including Becca's, have been highjacked by unknown hackers. The film morphs into a paranoid thriller wherein Karsh tries to find out what entities are bedeviling him. Terry, who has a conspiratorial slant, provides assistance and a bond between her and Karsh grows. They enlist Terry's ex, Maury (Guy Pearce), who is an expert computer programmer. Maury is a sullen nerd who has had previous fallings out with both Karsh and Terry, the latter characterizing Maury as a schmuck. However, Maury carries around grievances that makes him less than trustworthy. He functions within this film much as fellow computer nerd Harlan does in the cinematic twin to The Shrouds in the Cronenberg canon, Videodrome. In both films, unseen corporations or nation states coop cutting edge technology to usurp control over the bodies and minds of individuals. Who is there for Karsh to trust? His avatar Honey is certainly a dubious guide. Soo-Min is looking out for number one. Then there is the recurring dream Karsh has of Becca in which she seems to be incrementally losing body parts. Certainly, this bodes something sinister in store for Karsh.

I'm not going to spill the beans, but am going to say that I was enthralled with The Shrouds from beginning to end. The quality of the performances in the film is extremely accomplished, even the bit players. Guy Pearce has to tamp down his natural charisma to play a nerd, but he is effective and believable. I was astonished by the range displayed by Diane Kruger in her tripartite roles. I guess I tended to underrate her early in her career, probably because of her background in modeling, but I am now fully onboard the Kruger train. If the film has a flaw, it is Cassel. Like Léa Seydoux in Crimes of the Future, Cassel is saddled by Cronenberg with too many expository monologues for a thespian for who speaks English as a second language. That noted, Cassel is expert in using his body for the role. Cassel sculpts the outline of Karsh's body so that we see it as a steely carapace masking inner vulnerability.

The Shrouds was intended to be an episodic show for Netflix. Each episode would cover GraveTech franchises in separate countries enabling Cronenberg to explore an array of burial customs. Like David Lynch with Mulholland Drive, Cronenberg has fashioned fine cinematic wine from the sour grapes of television. 

Line of Demarcation

Jean Seberg and Maurice Ronet

Claude Chabrol's La Ligne de démarcation (Line of Demarcation) is a World War 2 French resistance drama that I found to be better than its reputation. It is one of those rare films that gets more interesting, deeper, and incisive as it goes along. The setting is a small French village bisected by a river which also serves as the line of demarcation between Vichy France and what remained, in 1942, of the German occupied French republic. We see various refugees, spies, and escapees from German terror try to cross into Vichy France during the course of the film. Eventually. the town's populace unites to help a wounded American. The film was based on a memoir by a hero of the Resistance named Gilbert Renault who published it under nom de plume, Colonel Rémy. The memoir has been streamlined and depersonalized by Chabrol with events conflated.

The initial section of the film drags, primarily because it focuses on the film's most lifeless characters, the aristocratic Count Pierre (Maurice Ronet) and his English born wife, Mary (Jean Seberg). Pierre has just come back from a hospital where he recovered from wounds received during the German conquest of France. He is crippled and embittered, epitomizing the defeatist attitude of Petain and his cohorts. Mary, however, has turned into the Mother Courage of the Resistance. So, their bisected union represents, all too baldly, the split between Vichy and the de Gaulle led Free French. The duo doesn't seem to be getting it on, as Pierre's limp signals, all too baldly, impotence. There is little the actors can do to animate these one dimensional placards, though Ms. Seberg seems to be acting only above the neck.

Happily, the other inhabitants of the village are well cast and memorably played. No performance descends into type, but transcends. I particularly enjoyed Daniel Gélin as the village doctor and Stéphane Audran as his wife who provide the film's only erotic spark. I also thought Jean-Louis Maury was delightfully slippery as a Gestapo fiend and Reinhard Kolldehoff was suitably ambivalent as a Wehrmacht major who tries to bond with Mary and Pierre in a tip of the chapeau to La Grande Illusion. 

Collective Solidarity

Line of Demarcation was initially targeted to be a Anthony Mann project, but Mann passed and recommended Chabrol to the producer. The film shoot, larger and more commercial than he was used to, was not a happy one for the director. However, I love the way Chabrol balances the demands of juggling over a dozen characters. I think the look he gives the 1966 film is not far from Mann's noir films, but with more of a gothic melodrama feel that is perfectly apt for a film about the horrors of Nazism. After Pierre sacrifices and redeems himself in the final reel, the town barman, a socialist and class opponent of Pierre, salutes him by leading the villagers in a rendition of La Marseillaise. This display of the collective solidarity of the French Resistance is a myth, given what we now know about the extent of collaboration during this period, but all countries need their own myths and Line of Demarcation is not a bad one.