House (1977). Grade: C+. In the Realm of the Senses (1976). Grade: C+

There’s only one real problem with watching foreign films, and that’s not reading subtitles. Most people will get over that very quickly.1

No, the problem is that if you don’t know the country and its history/culture a whole lot, you can’t know WHY certain movies came out at certain times. What about the culture of that time/place produced that movie?

Because based on House and In the Realm of the Senses, I’d say mid-70s Japan was… interesting.

You’ve got a psychedelic movie where seven teen girls go on vacation and get all eaten by a Murder House. And a arty porno where people actually are no-doubt-boinking on camera, based on a very famous true story. And both movies deal, very obliquely, with the painful legacy of WWII. That’s — that’s a LOT, as they say.

I hate to say it, but give credit where credit is due — the annoying, repetitive, cheesy score for House is actually half brilliant. It’s by Asei Kobayashi (a musician and singer who mostly scored animated films/TV series) and Mitsuyoshi Yoshino (of the rock band Godiego). BrightWallDarkRoom’s Drew Bird compares the main theme to something you’d hear from a music box (with all the sadness that implies). Bird even provides us with notation:

For the first half-hour, the movie’s like a cheesy parody of a teen film, and has the score repeated in a twinkly, poppy way. Eventually the girls make their way to a summer vacation at one of them’s aunt’s house. They hear/see in old movie footage the sad story of how the aunt fell in love, but before she could get married, her beau was killed in the war. She stayed alone ever since.

Then, at the 34 minute mark, one of the girls (framed by an idyllic painted backdrop of a sunset) meets one of her friends. But not ALL the friend. Her severed head. Which floats around and bites the girl on the butt. Then starts vomiting blood.

And, we’re off to the races of Crazeville. The goofy/silly/spooky effects shots and moments come bam-bam, one after another. We’ve got:

Eyeball mouth
Posessed melon
Posessed doll
Posessed bath/firewood/fireplace
Dancing skeleton
Flying aunt/cat
Posessed mirror/cat/piano/mattresses/1930s phone/doors/windows/ooze clock/goldfish/bureau
Ghost lady juggling glowy orbs
Possessed murder ceiling lamp
Gratuitous teen in panties/bathing/nude
Blood river
Toothed murder urn

And a possessed cat painting that does this:

My favorite? When we see one victim’s severed fingers dancing up and down to the musical theme.

What IS this?

Making-of accounts vary slightly, but here’s the general consensus. Toho Studios, the legendary production company that introduced the world to Godzilla and Akira Kurosawa, wasn’t doing so hot in the 1970s. So they were open to new ideas, and in particular wanted a horror movie, since Jaws had become such a huge hit. Enter Ôbayashi Nobuhiko.

Ôbayashi had been directing TV commercials for years, ranging in length from 12 seconds (so they needed punchy visuals) to two minutes. Film writer Christoph Huber tracked down one of them:

Charles Bronson, Love Machine.

Ôbayashi ignored the studio’s suggestion to make a Jaws ripoff, saying “a film about shark attacks only leads to films about bear attacks.” Instead, he consulted his preteen daughter about things that frightened her, figuring that adults “only think about things they understand ... children can come up with things that can't be explained.” Ôbayashi concocted a script so nutsballs, nobody wanted to direct it, thinking it would end their careers. So finally Ôbayashi got the go-ahead to direct it himself. He was told by a Toho exec: “This is the first time I have seen such a completely meaningless script. But maybe it’s a good thing I don’t understand. Please don’t try and make it into something I can comprehend.”

Per Lucille Hanson at “Perisphere” (the blog of the Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis), as soon as Toho told Ôbayashi they’d be making the film, he himself started churning out publicity ideas for the movie, including a novel, radio program, and “manga” comic:

So by the time the movie came out, the (mostly young) audience was primed to see it, and it was a reasonably successful release. Although critics weren’t as kind, with one calling it “the death of Japanese cinema,” and Toho seemed embarrassed by the thing. It never made it to home video until Criterion put it out in 2010.

Should you see it? That depends. If you like your movies to have narrative coherence and clearly-drawn characters, then Hell No. If you want your gore/horror to be scary and/or visually complex, then probably not. (Ôbayashi avoided planning the shots out in advance, and deliberately sought to create simple effects that even a child could design on their own.) Despite this having a regular Toho budget, it looks cheap. (Not boring; just cheap.)

But if you like movies where there’s just all kinds of visual madness on the screen, then sure. Be aware that everybody WILL die; the one adult who might attempt to save the girls gets turned into a pile of bananas instead.

Some people are going to react to this the way Tom Russo of the Boston Globe did; saying the film captures “the gonzo imagery in [Ôbayashi’s] head. He’s blithely, amusingly heedless of technical limitations that in some cases really ought to be stopping him for a rewrite.”

But some people really love how all-over-the-place this is, like Kevin Fermini here. If you’re interested in a horror movie that really upends the conventions of what a horror movie can be, this might be one for you.

And for those fans who love it, there’s a detailed look at more of Ôbayashi’s career by Paul Roquet here. Ôbayashi would go on to make an absolute slew of movies before his death in 2020; Criterion’s Chuck Stephens writes that one, Sada, was about the infamous story of Sada Abe.

Which also happens to be the subject of In the Realm of the Senses.

Who was Sada Abe? She was born in 1905, and in 1922, her parents (who had problems with some of Abe’s siblings) sold her to a geisha house. Abe was a victim of sexual abuse as a young teenager, and while she enjoyed performing music, she didn’t have the training for it that a traditional geisha would. So much of her work at the geisha house consisted of providing sex for clients. Abe eventually joined a straight-up brothel.

She tired of sex work, and took up a job as an apprentice in a restaurant in 1936. The owner, 42-year-old Kichizō Ishida, started an affair with Abe. It was sexually intense for a period of several weeks, and grew more adventurous, including the couple eventually experimenting with “erotic asphyxiation.” After a particularly extreme bout of this, Ishida was dead. Abe had strangled him.

But she was still sexually obsessed with him, so she cut off his penis/testicles and kept them with her until she was arrested three days later.

Obviously, the story gathered a LOT of attention in Japan. There was a best-seller based on Abe’s police confessions published in 1947; Abe wrote her own autobiography in 1948. She traded on her notoriety for years afterwards, and some regarded her as a sort of rebel hero. Her story was told in a 1969 documentary called History of Bizarre Crimes by Women and a 1975 only-in-Japan cheapie feature.

And then anti-establishment filmmaker Nagisa Ōshima got interested.

French producer Anatole Dauman, reacting to recent changes in French obscenity law, approached Ōshima at the Venice Film Festival in 1972 and said “let’s make a porno flick!” (Per a 1983 film magazine article partially included with the Criterion disc.) Ōshima suggested two story ideas, and Dauman loved the one about Abe.

Ōshima sat on the idea for a few years, not knowing how to write it, until he saw his first hard-core porno in a visit to America. (Japan had what were called “pink films,” which showed boobs and butts, but no outright porn at the time. Wiki compares “pink films” to movies like Basic Instinct in America.) The idea of shooting actual sex scenes, plus a full removal to any film restrictions in France in 1975, convinced Ōshima to make the movie using real sex, filmed in Japan, with the film processed/edited in France to avoid the censors. (Film critic Donal Richie, who had met Abe, says in his 2009 Criterion essay that the movie has never actually been shown in Japan without the penis shots blurred.)2

OK. You know what the movie will be about. You know it will have a considerable amount of actual sex in it. (And one brief scene of cruelty to children, described in this review.) Should you see it?

I’ll admit — it’s a movie I admired more than enjoyed. I kinda agree with Saulo Ferreira’s analysis that the movie “soon becomes emotionally flat and one-note. It’s hard to stay engaged when everything is laid bare from the start, leaving little space for the characters — or the audience — to evolve beyond discomfort.”

But — there are majorly impressive technical qualities. The musical score by Minoru Miki is good. The production design by Shigemasa Toda and cinematography by Hideo Itô are stunningly gorgeous and evocative, even though most of the movie takes place in one setting (the man’s house). I have MAJOR problems with Ōshima’s script and his judgement, but here he’s a heckuva filmmaker. Visually, this is sumptuous stuff, and I don’t mean the skin being shown.

The two main actors are quite good. Tatsuya Fuji plays the man, and Eiko Matsuda the woman. No, the characters don’t evolve much, yet they’re fully imagined. Fuji is a man drunk on his own social status/power; he’s by no means rich, but he lords it over his own little world. He’s the master of his wife and his servants, and enjoys shocking them with his behavior. Fuji gives this man just enough humanity that you don’t completely hate him, even though much of what he does is truly repellent; Fuji shows you the spiritual exhaustion behind the outward bravado. (He fasted for much of the shoot and lost 20 pounds over the duration.)

While Matsuda is simply extraordinary at playing what society would have once called a “nymphomaniac.” Thomas Spurlin points out that the character “is feral and dominant by nature, which could easily be overplayed” by a more conventional performance. (On the Criterion DVD, Fuji says that Matsuda’s background was in experimental theater.) Matsuda is physically fearless (this role demands it of both actors) but emotionally fearless, too; her increasing obsession/desperation takes her to levels few performers have ever matched. Fuji is very good; Matsuda is AMAZING.

Unfortunately the double standard still exists. Fuji would continue his long and successful movie/TV career (he’s still acting today). But Matsuda was (mostly) condemned in Japan for her “immorality,” and for showing all this dirty behavior to foreigners (since the movie was not permitted to be shown in Japan). The only offers she got were for porno roles, and she eventually moved to Europe.

My problems with Ōshima’s script and judgement are that I think he’s being more of a provocateur than an artist; I think he’s more excited by pushing the boundaries of censorship than he is in emotionally involving us with this strange, tragic story. You feel something real in Fuji and Matsuda’s peformances; the writing and story structure, less so.

I remember reading somewhere that when Ōshima made his 1983 Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (a similarly well-shot but emotionally uninvolving movie), Ōshima built an entire replica WWII prison camp, as the story is set in one. Makes sense, right? But Ōshima built the camp several times larger than he needed to film. He built parts of the camp that were never used and never intended to be used. So he could be the bigshot director making the studio pay for his megalomania.

I feel at times like he’s enjoying being able to tell the actors to do embarrassing things. (It was a closed set during the sex scenes; they would prep the scenes in regular low light, then when it came time to shoot, everyone but Ōshima and the actors would leave, and he would turn the lights on and operate the camera himself.) Fuji and Matsuda believe enough in their roles to stay in character during all the sex scenes, but it’s hard for me to avoid feeling as though the director is getting his power kink on, here.

A telling moment in the Fuji interview? He mentions how in 1936, when the story is set, Japan was marching towards its own destruction, its embrace of far-right, militaristic fascism. He talks about a scene in the movie where we see a parade of marching soldiers, and cheering crowds waving flags stand on one side of the street. We see Fuji walking on the other side of the street, in the opposite direction of the soldiers. Fuji says this shows his character, as flawed as he is, being a little bit of a rebel against the rise of the far-right; he’d rather have sex and march alone.

And then he says Ōshima asked him if he’d mind if the scene were cut out. Fuji responded, he would mind — that scene’s the reason he wanted to make the movie. He had to convince Ōshima to keep the scene in there.

I’ve read several reviews which say the movie is a political, anti-male authority allegory (all fascist movements worship male authority), and they mention that scene as an example of the movie’s social commentary subtext.3 They DON’T mention that Ōshima considered leaving it out.

Compare that to The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, another gorgeously-filmed, excellently-acted movie with a great deal of boundary-pushing, provocative material in it (including sex scenes, although they are simulated, not real). There’s no way, for one second, you can miss the political/social meanings of TCTTHW&HL. It’s about how repellent the people are who think they’ve triumphed over the meek and that nobody can ever stop them. The movie DESPISES those people. The social subtext in Realm of the Senses is one you have to squint really hard to see; it may not, in fact, be there at all.

Julian Ross’s essay about the film points out that Ōshima said “My hatred of Japanese film includes absolutely all of it,” quite the egotistical statement for a cinema tradition which had brought multiple great films and great filmmakers/actors to the world. Sounds to me like a king-hell egotist, breaking rules to prove he was more daring than anybody else. Not because he had anything genuine to say. (I give Ōshima credit for putting his butt on the line for freedom of expression, though. He was tried twice for obscenity for making this movie, and fortunately the court ruled in his favor both times.)

So there you have it. Two movies that definitely did things that Japan had never seen and the world had never seen. Neither are my cup of tea, but both are of interest to fans of film history. (Both were influential; Bowie said Realm was one of his inspirations for Heroes, and the “river of blood” parts of House have made it into several more famous films later.)

I can’t ever imagine ever watching either again by myself, and couldn’t imagine watching Realm of the Senses with someone else. (This writer said watching it in a revival theater was actually pretty awkward.)

I could imagine watching House with a fan of crazed horror movies who was curious about it. Just to see what they think. Along those lines, if you enjoy such movies, I’ll do what I usually don’t: here’s a link to an Internet Archive copy, if you don’t want to wait for a library DVD.4 If you liked some or all of it, or hated some or all of it (either reaction is valid!), let me know.

And even if you only watch about 5-10 minutes before turning it off (remember, the “good stuff” kicks in after 34 minutes), you’ll still probably have that dang tinkly music box theme stuck in your head for awhile!

Gotcha.

The Little Foxes (1941). Grade: C+

It’s more Bette Davis! That’s not on purpose, it’s just because we were doing some dogsitting, and the cute critters’ owners don’t have a DVD player. So, you’re limited to what’s on the various streamers, and when I typed in a few titles, this was one the streamer had. So this is the one we watched.

Davis and director William Wyler really got into it on this shoot, over multiple disagreements. A major one was Davis’s makeup, which she had personally designed for her by makeup expert Perc Westmore (members of the Westmore family still do makeup in Hollywood today). Wyler thought it made her look older; Davis WANTED to look older. Wyler said the makeup gave her a Kabuki theater appearance, David refused to change it. Who was right?

Both were right. The makeup DOES look kinda like a Kabuki mask, especially in the movie’s best moment (the only thing that makes this worth sitting through). But the look is GREAT — is wildly over-the-top, which is what the film needs. During that moment Davis’s face is utterly frozen into its mask-like pose, and it’s hilarious.

This is based on a 1939 play by Lillian Hellman, who adapted it herself; I haven’t read it. Per the back of an MGM DVD box I found when looking for images, “‘Hellman said that she wrote her “angry comedy” (Los Angeles Times) based on her own family’s biannual dinner at which people drew lots for the diamond that had been left in her great-grandmother’s estate.’”1 Per Wiki, it’s also inspired by Hellman’s in-laws who weren’t shy about bickering and insulting each other over money.

Davis is the de facto matriarch of a declining Southern family; her rich husband’s away for “health reasons” and she doesn’t seem to miss him much. She’s approached by her greedy brothers, Charles Dingle and Carl Benton Reid, who’ve got a business proposal. They want to invest in a new cotton mill that will take advantage of the area’s poverty to make a mint by paying people super-low wages. They just need her husband’s money.

Davis is all gung-ho on the idea. She can’t wait to get super-rich by any way she can, to leave this lousy backwater and live the city high life she’s always deserved. But, when her husband comes back from wherever-he-was (resting due to his heart condition), he’s not willing to go for it. It wouldn’t be honorable to take advantage of poor people that way.

Further complications ensue, ones Davis may/may not have inadvertently suggested herself. In the end, it looks like Davis sure is gonna be as rich as she wanted, although we’re given a shot of her looking sad (or constipated) because, in the process, she’s alienated every last member of her family and will have to live rich without love. The end.

There’s more than a few buckets of grits we’re being asked to swallow, here. First, that the South is full of rich families marked by Honor and Loyalty, and that Honor means they’d rather go broke than get rich by exploiting people.

Umm… isn’t that EXACTLY how EVERY rich Southern family got rich until 1865? By exploiting the hell out of people in the WORST way? (And, after 1865, doing everything they could do make their states non-union and as poor as possible so they could pay workers peanuts.)

Second, that rich people who get tons of money and piss off their families in the process feel really bad about it later. Sure. Right.

Hellman herself was a complicated cat. Born in Louisiana, she altered time with family in Louisiana and in New York, got married and divorced young, had a on-and-off relationship with crime fiction writer Dashiel Hammett for 30 years, and was a successful writer herself; her first Broadway hit, The Children’s Hour, came in 1934, and several others followed.

Hellman flirted with various forms of leftist ideologies. (She joined the screenwriters’ union, sensibly enough, because she was ticked about having had credit stolen on several movies.) This naturally ended up getting her in trouble in the 1950s, when the McCarthyite HUAC demanded she name names of people she’d known with socialist/communist sympathies. Hellman refused, and this got her blacklisted (although the blacklist applied to movie writing only, not playwriting, which she continued).

So I’m sure that Hellman’s loathing of exploitative capitalism was real. But what’s the point of dialogue like this? “There must be better ways of getting rich than building sweatshops and pounding the bones of the town to make dividends for you to spend. You'll wreck the town, you and your brothers. You'll wreck the country, you and your kind, if they let you.”

Sure! I agree! But nobody who disagrees is gonna be moved to change their minds by this sort of thing. (They’d happily explain to you instead the powers of “the invisible hand,” or whatever cliches they were using in the 30s/40s.) And the dialogue also doesn’t make sense from a dramatic perspective; is the other character supposed to respond, “oh my gosh! I’ve been so silly and bad! Thank you for teaching me the error of my ways”?

Actually, if it was a Shaw play, the character might have responded “precisely!” Then explained how doing the wrecking was such a fantastic idea that the original scold would switch sides and join the one they were scolding. But Shaw was a satirist, and this script is not satire.

It sure might be better as satire, though. I mean, the opening credits and establishing shots are so full of Dixie hokum it’s practically Song of the South shot in black-and-white. We see all kinds of poor rural shacks surrounded by Black people doing tedious farm chores while the music swells with psuedo-gospel-sounding gunk. I think we’re actually supposed to see this stuff and go, “how soulful and traditional and authentic,” and all you’ll probably think is “those people look really poor and really miserable.” And a scene where an idyllic young couple is out on the veranda at night (apparently, in 1900, when this was set, mosquitoes hadn’t been invented yet), with singing going on in the background. One character opines, “we have the pianos… but the darkies have the voices.” Good GRIEF.

(Music, such as it is, courtesy of one Meredith Willson… who wrote the words/music to The Music Man! A musical that made fun of small-town hokum and sentiment! But, come to think of it… beyond the two or three funny songs in The Music Man, there’s also some real gunk, so…)

That young couple out on the veranda is a problem, too, because their characters — who get a LOT of screen time — are real drips. The guy, Richard Carlson, is a complete non-entity, and would go on to be the square-jawed hero of such attractively-titled 50s low-budget sci-fi flix like It Came From Outer Space, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, and The Magnetic Monster. (C’mon, if you saw “The Magnetic Monster” late at night on old-timey cable listings, wouldn’t you click over and give it a look?)

The gal, Teresa Wright, was really excellent as a young girl who lost her illusions about her favorite relative in Shadow of a Doubt. But this character is written to be the embodiment of innocence and goodness and hope, and it’s a complete drag. I kept hoping one or both of them would run out in the street and get mowed down by one of them new-fangled automobiles. The gal’s in the play, but the guy’s not, and neither is this nauseating love story. Per the AFI Catalog website, producer Sam Goldwyn asked Lillian Hellman to add a love story/likable male character to give the audience someone less slimy than Davis/her brothers. Hellman tried, the studio had further suggestions, and then Hellman suggested some friends to do those rewrites. One of whom was the acerbic/cynical Dorothy Parker. Some of this “love plot” dialogue definitely sounds like something Parker typed up while snickering over a bourbon.

The Evil Brothers aren’t much better, although Charles Dingle has a little bit of fun with some of his lines at the end. The other Evil Brother has a son, Dan Duryea (effective as one of the baddies in Winchester ‘73), and he doesn’t seem to know if he’s supposed to be playing the character as dim-witted or “light in the loafers.” So Duryea does both, with a fair amount of sniveling cowardice thrown in there on top of a mild lisp. It’s an awful lot of acting “business” for such an insignificant part, yet the strangeness of this conception actually does kinda hold your interest a little. He’s certainly more lively than most of the rest of ‘em.

Patricia Collinge (also good in Shadow of a Doubt) has a little dignity as a despairing secret drunk, and so does Herbert Marshall as Davis’s long-suffering husband. (Marshall was English but his Southern accent is fine; the Brits can usually do good American accents but not vice versa.) Jessica Grayson as the “wise kindly large Black maid” has the most dignity of, all, despite her utterly insulting dialect dialogue. An accomplished contralto soloist in real life, Grayson got the part because the casting director was enthralled by her speaking voice.

But — make no bones about it — this is Bette Davis’s show. Here she is with that masklike visage as she’s very determined to let something very bad happen:

I actually was laughing my head off during this scene. It’s got camp elements to it, horror elements... it’s a blast. Davis is fine for the rest of the movie, but this is the part where she gets to be a real Bitch Goddess, and it’s the ONLY reason to see the movie. To set up this bit at the climax. It is so Kuul.

The rest of the time she’s mostly snapping off some really plainsville dialogue with a little panache to her delivery, or delivering icy stares, or turning the lights UP on a young couple to show them who’s the boss. The character, as written, is not particularly interesting, yet Davis is always fun to watch. She’s got the biggest hair in the movie — at times, it’s piled nearly twice as high as it is in that photo — and she wears that hair like the crown of some famed empress known as “Zisanter the Bloody” or such.

A curious side thing that’s going on in this movie; it slides through the cracks of the Hays Code. Crime’s not supposed to pay, remember? Well, Davis’s evil brothers and Dan Duryea definitely do commit a crime, although by the end of the movie there’s nobody who it directly harmed. (Except the low-wage workers who’ll be screwed over by the new cotton mill, but that’s legal.) And while Davis doesn’t commit a crime, she definitely doesn’t lift a finger as a Bad Thing Happens. Although, again, technically: not a crime. Plus, there’s also the “punishment” of having her family hate her, which, I suppose, is the reason mean ol’ Mr. Potter is allowed to get away with swiping thousands of dollars in It’s a Wonderful Life. You see, he’s not as happy as George Bailey is at the end, he’s so much LONELIER! I don’t think Mr. Potter cares, and the character Davis plays here wouldn’t really care either. (Davis is directed, by William Wyler, to end with a Sad Look, but I ain’t buying it.)

Wyler was no great shakes as a director — his contemporary and commercial equal, Michael Curtiz, had a much better visual imagination — but at least he’s not the rank dullard Joseph Mankiewicz was, so this is an easier watch than All About Eve. It’s got that film’s flaw of being too long, but that’s Sam Goldwyn’s fault; you could excise the love plot completely here and it wouldn’t hurt the movie at all. (It would probably help Teresa Wright’s performance a LOT.) The cinematography’s by the great Gregg Tolnad, although you really wouldn’t know it. (Until some of the shots near the end where there’s interesting stuff going on in the deep background of the image.)

This was the third and last time Wyler and Davis worked together; per Margarita Lanazuri at TCM, the director never asked Davis to be in another one of his movies, because he was so ticked by her stubbornness here. (It wasn’t just the makeup; Wyler wanted a lighter, sexier performance and Davis wanted to play it mean.) It’s too bad that people in Hollywood tend to think they’re doing something as important as curing polio, because they could have compromised here; staying true to each’s “vision” of the original material didn’t matter. (The original material doesn’t seem that hot to me.) Let Davis have her masklike makeup (it sure helps the end), and let the character be a little funnier too. (That never hurthurtss anything.)

Of the other two Wyler/Davis films, one sounds pretty interesting; 1940’s The Letter, where Davis (per this site) “has never been more unsympathetic.” Cool! The other is 1938’s Jezebel, where Davis is “a headstrong Southern belle who loses her beau due to her bratty behavior.” Eh, I’m not too interested in movies about Southern belles, especially not ones we’re asked to feel sorry for (which I suppose we would be if she loses her boyfriend). Who’s the “beau” she loses?

Henry Fonda. Henry Fonda as “Preston Dillard,” presumably also a Southerner. Fonda trying to do a Southern accent sounds almost silly enough to be worth checking out… but there’s all kinds of other silly movies I’d rather try out first, thank you very much.

Marked Woman (1937). Grade: C+

You know what a “dance hall hostess” means in movies, don’t you? From about 1929 to 1969? It means “hooker.” Any time somebody’s shown as a dance hall hostess, that’s implying they’re a sex worker. Except for in a few Hollywood films prior to 1934, or foreign films like The Threepenny Opera, where you might have characters who are ACTUAL sex workers. For the most part, they were “dance hall hostesses,” instead.

Which was probably unfair to people who worked in/ran dance halls! A lot of them weren’t hotbeds of prostitution, they were places where young people could go and have a good time fairly cheaply! From Wiki:

“Halls attracted negative attention from moral reformers and the media for the types of dancing done at these establishments, the sexual independence these environments allowed women, and the difficulty of regulating dance halls. Simple dance moves were already seen as morally wrong by select religious groups prior to the popularity of dance halls but with the additions of possibilities for prostitution, as well as access to alcohol, within dance halls reformers and religious leaders were increasingly against the existence of these halls. In order to discourage young adults from frequenting dance halls, media of the early twentieth century used subjective and inflammatory language to sway readers toward ideas that dance halls would morally corrupt young women while reformers petitioned to their local governments for regulation surrounding dance halls.”

It probably didn’t help their reputation that some dance halls were integrated, too! The horror! Finally there was a government committee set up to enforce “rules and regulations” concerning dance halls, as well as other things the “vice investigators” felt to be worth looking at. The committee’s main goal was finding a way to reduce the number of STDs among American soldiers. It was officially called the Commission on Training Camp Activities, but it was frequently referred to by the name of the lawyer appointed to lead the things.

Yep, the committee devoted to stopping VD was the Fosdick Committee. Ain’t history grand?

Our movie opens in a dance hall in NYC, one that bigshot gangster Eduardo Ciannelli has just bought/taken over. There’s a meeting for all the ladies who work there. Ciannelli explains that he’s gonna make the joint a hotspot for high rollers, meaning illegal gamblers. It’s also gonna be a “clip joint.” That’s not a term I know, but Wiki has the definition here. A clip joint is one where the high rollers are played for suckers; they’re given outrageous bills for the bar tab they run up, and the collection agency are the gangsters.

Bette Davis, the toughest-minded of the dance hostesses, asks what’s in it for them? After all, now they’re gonna run a big risk of getting in trouble with the law. Ciannelli tells her, what’s in it for you is you’ll make 30 times what you used to. He takes a cut, and if there is any legal trouble, he’ll cover the lawyer costs. It’ll be good money for the gals, and while it’s his way or the highway, Ciannelli says, he’s always loyal to people who are loyal to him.

Davis figures this deal is alright. Especially once she sticks up for one of the gals Ciannelli wants to fire for being too “old.” Ciannelli backs down; he allows the “old” gal to stay. And he’s impressed enough by Davis that he propositions her. She turns him down, and he accepts it. Davis figures she can do business with this dude.

Oh, but the club name has gotta go. It’s called “Intime,” French for intimate. Ciannelli insists it be called “Club Intimate” instead, he don’t like that fruity foreign stuff. And he’s gonna bring in some fancy decor. Lying gangsters sure love their fancy decor, don’t they?

Soon enough, the gals are all hard at work plying the customers with sexy gowns and plenty of liquor. One guy’s a real mark, easy for Davis to soften up. He loses a ton and gets handed a big bill, and wants Davis to go along in his cab for further fun. She does, since it’s a way to milk him for more cash.

In the cab, the guy admits he’s been lying about having money. Wait ‘til those fools at Club Intimate try to cash his check! It’ll totally bounce.

Davis tells the guy, no, they’ll break your kneecaps to get their money — or worse. You’d better take the first train back to Hicksville in the morning. The guy agrees, and they part ways. Too late for him, though — the gangsters get him before he can leave town. He’s found dead.

And that’s where D.A. Humphrey Bogart enters the story…

Bogart and Davis had actually appeared together in a movie once before, The Petrified Forest. Where he played a gangster/criminal, which were his typecast roles for the period; They Live by Night, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, High Sierra, The Roaring Twenties — and those are just the ones I’ve seen recently, there’s tons more. Occasionally Warners would throw Bogart into a good guy role like this, but hoodlums were the roles Bogart could take to the bank.

He’s alright at first, when he’s trying to lean on the dance hall ladies to turn against Ciannelli — and he’s great in a scene where he’s utterly pissed at Davis later. But eventually, Bogart has to deliver some really crummy dialogue in an “impassioned courtroom speech.” (I’m not ruining anything by saying that Ciannelli goes down in the end — this is the Hays Code era, and Crime Doesn’t Pay.) Bogie as a idealistic lawyer crusading for justice doesn’t suit him (he’d soon become a huge star because of roles where he played a good-but-slightly-questionably-good guy.) Bogart doesn’t seem to know how to physically hold his body in “impassioned courtroom” scenes; he seems stiff and amateurish (which he certainly WASN’T in The Petrified Forest). I don’t know that anyone could do much with this clunky dialogue; maybe Edward G. Robinson, Bogart’s fellow Warners gangster, might have. Robinson was getting pretty sick of his gangster roles by this point.

Also sick of sh***y roles was Bette Davis. In fact, this was her first film for Warners since coming back to America. She’d asked to be allowed to go to England to make a movie for RKO; Warners refused, so Davis went to England anyways. The studio sued her for breach of contract, and won. Unusually, when she returned to Hollywood, the studio didn’t punish her for her rebellion by sticking her in even sh***ier movies; she actually liked the script for this one.

Blogger Frank Showalter has this excerpt from Davis’s autobiography The Lonely Life, about why she fled to England. It concerns a movie Davis really, really didn’t want to make:

I was so distressed by the whole tone of the script and the vapidity of my part that I marched up to Mr. Warner’s office and demanded that I be given work that was commensurate with my proven ability. I was promised wonderful things if only I would do this film. On its completion, my next assignment was the part of a female lumberjack in God’s Country and the Woman, a script so undistinguished and a part so stupid that I flatly refused to play it.

That script with its “vapid” part? Satan Met a Lady. Which was a comic version of a Dashiell Hammett novel (one that had already been filmed before!). It did not go over well. Critic Bosley Crowther called it “‘a cynical farce of elaborate and sustained cheapness” that “deserves to be quoted as a classic of dullness.’”

Five years later, Warners would film the same novel again, this time, doing it as a straight crime drama. With Humphrey Bogart as the main detective. It was The Maltese Falcon, and it was a monster success, and his career would never be the same.

Also changing Bogart’s life would be this movie, for different reasons. It’s where he first worked with Mayo Methot — playing that dance hall gal Davis saved from getting fired for being “too old.” Methot was 33 when this came out. Here she is in the opening credits, which have fun headshots of all the main cast in character:

My, doesn’t she seem fun!

Bogart thought so, at any rate, and they were married in 1938. It was a DISASTER.

Methot liked her fiery beverages as much as Bogart did; but when he got drunk, he became impatient with annoying pretentious types. When she got drunk, she got mad at Bogart. Their fights became well known as the “battling Bogarts.” She stabbed him, he hit her, both attacked each other with broken whiskey bottles, it was a whole deal. He eventually took up with the too young but extremely kind Lauren Bacall. And Methot sadly died in 1951.

She’s fine as one of the dance-hall ladies, though, as are a bevy of staple “flapper”-style faces; Isabell Jewell, Rosalind Marquis, Lola Lane. If this at times feels like one of those quickie “backstage Broadway” movies churned out earlier in the decade, that’s probably because this director, Lloyd Bacon, worked on several of those, like the enjoyable 42nd Street. There’s even a couple of songs at the nightclub; the bland “Silver Dollar Man,” and the truly execrable “Mr. and Mrs. Doakes.” That one, sung by Lane (her voice is fine), is a maudlin heap of s**t about how the real happy people are the squares at home who’ve never been to a fun nightclub (probably never been to a city at all), a homespun wife who does her knitting while her husband smokes his pipe. It’s meant to remind the audience that while they’re enjoying all this naughtiness depicted on screen (which is hardly naughty as all compared to pre-Hays Code stuff), it is all bad and domestic bores are the virtuous people. Barf.

That barfiness pops up too in the character of Davis’s younger sister, played by Jane Bryan. Bryan’s fine in the role,1 it’s the character that’s soggy. You see, she’s the fresh-faced college kid from out of town on a day trip to the city to watch her school team play. She’s supposed to represent all the fresh-faced innocence that Davis and all the other “marked women” have lost. Double barf! Basically, she’s here to advance the plot. There’s a trial where Bogart tries to get Ciannelli and fails, then Ciannelly Does Dirty to Davis’s kid sister, and that’s what sends Davis back to Bogart, determined to nail him for good. (None of this is “spoiling” anything; the minute the sister shows up, you know she’s gonna be “ruined” by the Evil City, somehow.)

This was theoretically “ripped from the headlines,” as they say. In 1936, gangster Lucky Luciano had been sentenced to 30-50 years in jail for “pandering,” that is, pimping.2 One of the main features of his trial were the prostitutes who had worked for Luciano and were willing to testify against him. So Warners jumped at the idea, buying the rights to a Liberty magazine series about Luciano, and hired Abem Finkel and Robert Rossen (later writer/director of The Hustler) to punch out a script. The movie came with this disclosure, though, since the Code forbade portraying any actual real-life criminals on screen:

Sure, Warners.

My guess is that Rossen wrote most of the “how crime works” stuff, Finkel most of the “inspiring speeches” stuff, and the uncredited Seton I. Miller most of the jokes (after being wined/dined at a Chinese restaurant, one of the ladies complains “one more dish of egg foo young and I’d have put my hair in a ponytail and opened a laundry.”) Allen Jenkins shows up as a seller of Big Furs who the gals get to make some wisecracks about; this blogger says Jenkins was a major Warners regular in stock parts like these. (His presence does not really explain WHY he became a regular.)

Kind of fun here is Eduardo Ciannelli as the gangster guy. Generally, the actors playing gangsters never come across to me like actual gangsters would, yet Ciannelli seems a bit genuinely spooky and pretty dang wily, if not exactly a genius. Actually born in Italy, he studied surgery and did practice medicine for awhile before turning to theater and opera; he was a “grand baritone.” Old-timey movie fans may have seen him playing the leader of a murderous Thuggee cult (!) in Gunga Din.

And, of course, you have Davis, doing her thing where she seems tougher/wiser than her age (she was actually 29 at the time, but looks younger). She refuses to back down from any man in the movie — this is one of the few movies of the era that doesn’t have any love sideplot in the way! It does seem like Bogart is kinda wanting to throw himself at her, although he’s not particularly successful at it. (It’s suggested that this is because Davis is too disgusted with her nasty dance-hall self to believe she can deserve a nice guy, which… barf, again.)

This movie does really show you how badly the Hays Code had made American movies, on the whole, a great deal stupider. Three years ago, there wouldn’t have been any need for all this hand-wringing over the ladies’ chosen profession. The real meat of the story is how, sure, the gals are making money under Ciannelli… but it’s at his whim, and all his promises to “be loyal to the people who’ve been loyal to me” turn out to be bunk. (Just about everybody has had the experience of working for a boss/company that promises to “look out for its workers” and means no such thing. Definitely in 1936, people had that fresh in their heads.)

The story doesn’t need the ladies to be socially-stigmatized on top of being at the mercy of their boss… but the censors liked their moralizing. And so did the public. This was kinda like the Rome/Christianity movies, such as The Sign of the Cross, that promised all kinds of “immorality” for audiences so shake their heads and wag their fingers at… but find totally titillating at the same time. Check out this ad:

“‘See the “hot spots” in the hours before dawn!’” “WE WARN YOU!”

Writers Harry Warden / Al Dubin really do deserve to be publicly shamed for “Mr. & Mrs. Doakes,” though. It is a DREADFUL song. And while the rest of their work in other musicals wasn’t exactly classic, they did come up with a few tunes I like; “I Only Have Eyes For You,” for example. Or, click here to watch Ginger Rogers singing “We’re in the Money” in Pig Latin. Seriously — she does.

Still, director Lloyd Bacon seems to have had some skills at handling casts full of tough-talkin’ dames like this one, and you’ll generally have a good enough time here to not mind the cheesy bits. (They don’t last too long). None of the rest of Bacon’s work here is anything notable, and the cinematography by George Barnes ain’t bad, but it IS lazy. (In one one room, the sun is shining through blinds, then we enter a different room facing the opposite direction, and… the sun is shining through blinds. I guess Earth has two suns now.)

Plus Davis is fun as usual. Per Margarita Landazuri at TCM, there’s a scene where Davis has been roughed up by some goons, and the bandage the makeup department put on her face was too dainty. During her lunch break, Davis went to her regular doctor and asked him to bandage her up more realistically.3 When she got back to the set, security called studio exec Hal Wallis to tell him that Davis had been in a dreadful accident.

That same Hal Wallis complained that bit-part extra Hymie Marks didn’t look tough enough to be a gangster. Actually, Marks had worked for Lucky Luciano. Ain’t that just like a studio executive! All the things you could criticize in the movie (the moralizing plotty bits and bad courtroom speeches), and because you don’t know how anything works, you focus on one minor extra… and you’re wrong about the guy anyways. Studio execs! Haven’t gotten much wiser in the last 90 years, sorry to say.

Nasrin (2020). Grade: B-

The movie begins with some interesting historical facts on the screen. How in 530 BC, Persian women had the right to an education, to own property, and to choose who they married. How by 224 AD, those rights were gone. How those rights have come and gone, been granted and taken away, by subsequent ruling powers in Persia (now Iran) since.

And, as human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh explains later on in the movie, this is why having rights “given” to women is never enough. Those rights must be preserved and held BY women, they must have an equal say in who has political power. Otherwise, they are never, really, rights at all.

There’s another historical fact which the movie refers to — briefly — and it’s one that most Americans aren’t aware of. How Iran was a somewhat democratic society from 1950-1953. (Women still couldn't vote.)

Under the leadership of prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran decided it would nationalize its oil supply. Most oil contracts in the region had been signed decades before it was clear that the world would (for now) run on oil. Before countries knew how truly valuable those oil holdings were. (The great promoter of American democracy, Thomas Paine, enjoyed lighting natural oil springs on fire to watch ‘em burn, cause boys like lighting things on fire, and nobody thought there was much more you could do with petroleum back in the day.)

Well, if Iran nationalized its oil supply — if it processed and sold the oil itself, with the profits going to the people of Iran through social services — that would mean a BIG money loss for the company which had previously done the processing/selling. That was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. You know it today as BP.

BP didn’t like this, so it begged the British government to DO something, and the Brits called their buddies the USA. We just happened to have a pretty brand spanking new agency called the CIA, which was eager for doing some international shenanigans. And shenanigans we did, overthrowing the government and putting the former monarchical ruler “Shah” Reza Pahlavi back in charge, a guy so heinous that ever nice Jimmy Carter was hesitant to let him into the US for medical treatment decades later.

(Jimmy, a devout Baptist, was so ticked when Henry Kissinger leaned on him to let the Shah go to the Mayo Clinic, that he hung up the phone after Kissinger’s call and yelled, “f**k the Shah!” That wasn’t, generally, the language Carter used.)

Eventually, the Shah was overthrown by radical revolutionaries in 1979, and replaced with the rotten, authoritarian Islamic Republic that still rules the country today. (A great many Iranian liberals supported the revolution, believing that nobody could be worse than the Shah. You can see some of this in the outstanding movie Persepolis, directed by Marjane Satrapi and based on her books/comics of the same name.)

The current authoritarians in Iran have sharply restricted women’s rights; most things like independent travel or employment are illegal without a father or husband’s permission. (It’s still a marginally better country for women to live in than our longtime ally, Saudia Arabia.)

Yet even though Nasrin Sotoudeh’s parents were traditional and religious, they supported their daughter’s wish to follow her own goals, and eventually Sotoudeh became a lawyer. And what she’s been doing, ever since, has been trying to work within the flawed, corrupt Iranian legal system to gain some rights for women, and for unjustly sentenced prisoners. When she’s not a prisoner herself.

Sotoudeh has been jailed multiple times, on utterly ridiculous charges. Some are described to us in the movie; she’s accused of being a Western spy, and wanting to promote prostitution. (That prostitution one comes up a lot when I see Iranian movies; whenever women ask to be given any freedom, the authorities love to accuse them of wanting to be prostitutes or promote prostitution.)

The most heartbreaking thing in the movie is when Sotoudeh is in the infamous Evin Prison, and we hear audio of her phone calls with her family. It reminds you that Sotoudeh isn’t someone being jailed because she likes scoring publicity points that way; she’s a damn mom who’d prefer to be with her family. (In one phone call she’s trying to cheer up her son by asking him about the latest puzzle game he’s downloaded on his IPad.) It’s also heartbreaking because it appears that, in Iran, it’s easier for prisoners to call their families than it is in many American prisons. (Just as in Iran a woman with permission from her father/husband has an easier time obtaining an abortion than one in Texas.)

Sotoudeh’s most recent jail stint began in April of this year, following American & Israeli attacks on Iran’s dangerous weapons, such as a girls’ elementary school. As basically anyone could have predicted, the Iranian government responded to the attacks by cracking down on dissenters, social reform advocates, and artists. This time, Sotoudeh was only allowed one phone call, and her family was enormously worried. Fortunately, she was released on medical leave on May 13. Unfortunately, her husband, Reza Khandan, is still in jail. He’s been there since December 2024. On the grounds of being Sotoudeh’s husband, essentially.

We meet Reza Khandan in this movie, and Reza/Nasrin’s smart, determined daughter, Mehraveh Khandan (who is now studying in Amsterdam). We meet several fellow activists / reformers as well; about 75% of the documentary was clandestinely filmed in Iran, by Iranian camera crews. The footage was assembled and narration written by American documentary filmmaker Jeff Kaufman and producer Marcia Ross over the course of four years.

The 25% of footage that’s NOT shot in Iran is from news reports. One imagines it’s CNN Europe, because you sure won’t see much mention of Nasrin Sotoudeh in American media. At one point, when Sotoudeh is on a hunger strike in prison, the movie shows us people protesting for her realease in Canada, in Brussels, in Amsterdam, and more. In America? Somebody rented a truck that had Sotoudeh’s face painted on it and drove it around NYC. That’s about it.

It’s not like Americans, by their nature, don’t care about these things. In the 1980s, everybody in my high school knew who Nelson Mandela was. Many people know who Chinese artist/dissident Ai Weiwei is. But our media has no interest in covering virtually anything outside the scope of American politics, these days. The people who’d like to learn about activists like Sotoudeh aren’t given the opportunity. I’d never heard of her before we saw Jafar Panahi’s Taxi a month ago. Where Panahi pretends to be a taxi driver in Tehran, and meets people with views all over the political spectrum. At one point, Panahi’s young daughter, who’s riding in the taxi, happily exclaims, “there’s the flower lady!” It’s Sotoudeh.1

Another thing that’s mentioned in Taxi are the harsh prison sentences, particularly of young people, juveniles, sometimes for minor property crimes. Those are among the cases Sotoudeh works in in this film, trying to get the sentences reduced. Sometimes she’s successful; sometimes she’s not. Including one case where she was trying to save a teen from execution. It’s not an easy thing to shrug off, and she sure doesn’t.

A different case is when Sotoudeh represents one of the “Girls of Revolution Street,” women who stood on pedestals, removed their hijabs (head scarves) and held the hijabs aloft on poles or stucks, as a sort of flag of freedom. (Hijabs are mandatory for all women traveling outdoors, and have been since 1979. Sotoudeh doesn’t wear one in her office.) In this case Sotoudeh IS able to get the girl out on bail, helpfully provided by a local businessman.

And at one point, she’s not trying to make a case at all, she’s just calmly asking a man to show some empathy. The father of two young men who stabbed a 63-year-old to death simply because he was a member of the Baháʼí Faith, a religion of about 7.5 million worldwide that teaches the equality of all faith traditions. (Shudder!) The two young men were released after only two months in jail. All Sotoudeh wants is for the killers’ father to feel bad for the families of the victim. And he’ll say he’s appalled by the act — but that’s about it.

At times you may feel frustrated by the movie’s lack of a clear narrative. It doesn’t, like Yung Chang’s fine documentary about the late journalist Robert Fisk, tell the story of Sotoudeh’s entire career; mostly, what we see are snippets of her various efforts today. But that frustration is a way of representing the frustration Sotoudeh faces as she tries to beat back the same barricades, over and over. This isn’t an Erin Brokovich-style story of one gutsy activist’s inspiring victory; it’s a story of one (among many) gutsy activists trying to hold their ground against a system that’s trying to crush their hopes.

Near the end we see Sotoudeh in the audience for a performance of Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden, about people trying to get justice for the years of abuse suffered under an authoritarian regime. (One dissident, Nazanin Deyhimi, put on a performance of the play in Evin Prison; Sotodeh still has one of the props. Deyhimi died at age 29.) They’re hoping for the day where they, too, can seek justice. And now the attacks on Iran by two striving-to-be authoritarian regimes have probably pushed back any chance of that happening for years and years.

This isn’t a feel-good movie that’s gonna give you hope for the future. Yet it’s not a stone-cold bummer, either. Sotoudeh, a woman so gutsy she once went on a prison hunger strike and wouldn’t even drink water (that can kill you in a few days!), is frequently shown as frustrated or disappointed, yet she’s not a quitter. She isn’t despairing. In her shoes, I sure would be! But she’s a tougher soul than I am — well, that’s not a major compliment. She’s tougher than most of us, I think. This is simply a movie that can tell you something of what life in Iran is like, and what some people are trying to do about it. If that’s the kind of thing you’re ever interested in reading or learning about, here’s a chance to do that. And, for now, it is free on the TubeYous. Take a look.

(Site note: there will be no post tomorrow. Thanks as always for reading, and we'll be back to your regularly-scheduled programming on Monday.)

Y tu mamá también (2001). Grade: C+

I’m no prude about sex on screen. I think in most cases, it’s unnecessary, but it doesn’t offend me. Yet it does make me feel embarrassed for the actors. An example I like to bring up is how, in Bull Durham, there’s a long sequence where Susan Sarandon and Kevin Costner get together, involving sexy bathtub candles and all sorts of other silly pseudo-erotic s**t.

But you don’t need it. You’ve got a morning-after scene where Sarandon is tousled and happy looking in the kitchen, wearing only a T-shirt, eating cereal. And when Costner walks into the room she says, “damn, you’re beautiful.” That gets the point across perfectly! And the actors didn’t need to be uncomfortably nekkid around a film crew for a couple of days.

There’s like five or so sex scenes in Y tu mamá también, and I don’t think they really add a lot to the movie. (OK, one is pretty funny — a guy jumps behind a bed to hide and finds something down there.) Maybe you could argue that they are important to the story… but then you’ve got the problem of this not being all that great a story.

The Criterion disc has interviews with the actors and with director Alfonso Cuarón, who wrote the script with his brother Carlos Cuarón. And he says that the story was inspired by the fun road trips he and his brother took when they were younguns. That’s not a bad subject for a fun comedy! Make a movie about that!

Because I really don’t think that those roads trips involved the two brothers laying on parallel swimming-pool diving boards and simultaneously choking their respective chickens. Or, if they did, that’s one WEIRD family. Make a movie about THAT.

Yer plot is, youngun buddies Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, both relatively upper-class sorts in Mexico City, have just graduated from high school. Their girlfriends are heading on a summer trip to Europe, so the boyos each have a goodbye screw and promise to be faithful all summer. (Yup, we open with teen sex, if that’s something you want to see and you don’t know how Special Sites work. It’s not something I’m particularly eager to see, although it does seem as though the youngsters involved were all age-of-consent, so that’s good.)

The boyos have no intention of staying true to their ladies, however. What they wanna do is get laid as often as possible all summer. (It’s like they’re trying to have the real-life version of every early-80s teen comedy.) At one point, at a family wedding reception where all the guests are fellow richie types, the boyos meet attractive older woman Maribel Verdú (she’s around 30), and braggingly tell her about the amazing road trip they’re about to take to this Like Way Awesome Radical Tubular beach they know. (They’ve never been to any such place.) The boyos brashly invite Verdú to come along. Realizing they’re full-of-s**t moron teens, Verdú laughs them off.

But a couple of days later, Verdú makes a doctor visit that doesn’t leave her looking happy, and then gets a double whammy; her husband, on a business trip of some kind, calls her up when he’s plowed and confesses he’s had a fling. And that he’s really, really sorry about it.

Verdú enters “I doona givva feck” mode (or would if she was a character from Trainspotting), and tells the boyos, what the heck, I’ll go on your trip. And then the rest of the movie is them hanging in the car, and talking, and (as you may have guessed from the intro) having sex. And then there’s an ending that attempts to be elegiac and doesn’t quite get there.

Actually, this is not an unsalvageable idea for a movie, if the teens were more likeable. And the two actors, Bernal and Luna, are both perfectly likeable. It’s just that their characters really aren’t.

I think what the Cuaróns are doing here is to criticize typical male machismo attitudes; the callousness towards women, the double-standards when it comes to fidelity. That’s a perfectly good subject. But by making 2/3 of your cast pretty distasteful blowhards, it’s a movie that’s not especially pleasant to watch a good deal of the time. And it’s not as though Bernal and Luna end the movie having learned anything about NOT being macho doinks. They just have reasons to feel kinda sad because they probably can’t be friends anymore. I’m sorry, but I just don’t care if these two are friends or not. They can go find some other buddies to whack it on diving boards with.

This hyper-macho friendship seems odd to me for class reasons, too. On the interview video, Cuarón talks about how, when he was a teen, one of his best friends was really upper-crust; he attended a wedding like the one in this movie, where the President was a guest. And Cuarón says his family was a notch below that social level. (In Roma, which Cuarón says was inspired by his childhood memories, the family does have a live-in maid, so they’re not exactly middle-class themselves.) But I get it. There’s pretty rich, pretty connected families, and there’s REALLY rich and connected families. I suppose there is a difference.

However: I went to a pretty swanky high school. (They accepted a small number of poor kids with good test scores on scholarship each year.) I know that “swanky” in Oregon is far different than “swanky” in, say, NYC, but it’s still a school that costs $50,000 a year today. You’re talking mostly pretty rich families.

And the seniors I knew behaved NOTHING like these boyos do. Some were genuine a**holes for other reasons, but I don’t remember anybody who had this kind of noxious Party Frat Meathead energy. Even if they’d been like that when they were 12 (before I met ‘em), part of the reason you send kids to an expensive-a** school is to teach them the proper methods of expressing a**hole-ry. Being a total class snob, that’s fine. Being a moronic macho a**hole, that’s for The Poors.

Of course, we have a sitting Supreme Court Justice who came from a mega-rich family and went to an expensive high school and he very likely raped a teenage girl at a party and that’s WAY worse than how Bernal and Luna behave here; they’re just annoying, they’re not psychotic sadists. So I guess it all depends on WHICH rich world you’re talking about.

In any case, as annoying as the boyos’ behavior is, we’ve got Maribel Verdú to side with. And she saves the movie. I don’t believe that this character would be gallivanting off with some dippy teens in her situation — I think she’d be more likely to go off with her friends. But I’m glad the movie contrives to have Verdú take the trip offer, because without her, this would have been a total slog.

In the early part of the trip, she listens to the boyos’ nerdy chatter about their imaginary private club, the “Charolastras” (astral cowboys). How they have special rules and mantras (like “pop beats poetry” and “getting high once a day keeps the doctor away.”) It’s the best scene in the movie; it reminds me of something me and my friends did, although that was more a 13-year-old thing, not an 18-year-old one. (We were more into sci-fi and 1930s horror, not weed.) And Verdú enjoys listening to these guys brag about what ladies’ men they are, because she knows they’re geeks at heart.

Eventually, Verdú goes ahead and has sex with one of the youngsters, then the other, and the first time this starts happening, the scene has a little heat to it — it’ll remind any straight male of what their “first time” fantasies were like when they were 14 or 15 or so. But as the scene goes on, and with the next one, I simply felt embarrassed for Verdú. Not AS much for Bernal and Luna, who were in their early 20s — an age where being a little daring and “I don’t care” comes naturally to a lot of people. (Both in the interviews on the disc and in this 2021 NYT look back, the actors said they enjoyed making the movie and are proud of it. Fans of the film should check out that NYT article for alternative views on the ending.)

This looks very good — all Cuarón’s do — and it’s shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, who attended film school with Cuarón and has shot all his movies (minus the one with Alan Rickman in it). There’s one shot from a balcony in Mexico City where the clouds in the distance are absolutely amazing. I don’t think it’s possible to shoot scenery in Mexico and NOT have it look amazing. There’s all kind of fun little details added to the art/set decoration, like this:

Here it is a bit closer-in:

That’s Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, who to the boys is just a coolness symbol — they’ve got no idea what he stood for.

The late appearance of Silverio Palacios and Meyra Serbulo as a family that relies on local fishing and renting the occasional room is welcome — it distracts from the self-absorption of the boyos. A narrator (Daniel Giménez Cacho) tells us that the family will have to give up their modest lifestyle a short while later, when a luxury hotel is built on their communal land. And while Palacios will try to operate a fishing-guide business, the local bigwigs will force him out. He’ll work at a janitor at the fancy hotel that displaced his home, and he’ll “never fish again.” (Not even for fun, apparently, it’ll be RUINED for him forever.)

That narrator pipes in a lot, and the things he says always (kinda sorta) MEAN something, or imply it. As do the various people/places/signs our throuple pass by or mildly interact with along the way. On the disc’s extra features, there’s an interview with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (who is always entertainingly over-exuberant) gushing about the political messages of the film. Which might make more sense to Mexican (or Slovenian?) audiences than they do to me.

I’m stuck with the same reaction I generally have with movies that imply a political point, but are a bit vague about what that point, specifically, is. I feel as though, if you want to make a political point, MAKE IT. Have Robert Walden in All the President’s Men EXPLAIN how underhanded campaign tactics work. Dare to be obvious.

I almost, typed a few paragraphs above, how I wished Cuarón had made the movie about the displaced fishing family, instead of these dull boyos who don’t deserve to get to hang and bang with any lady as classy as Maribel Verdú. But I realized that, no, I would not want Cuarón to make a movie about a displaced fishing family. For that to be good, the filmmakers need to feel intense empathy with the characters who are suffering and screwed-over. And that’s simply not the kind of director Cuarón is. Even in Roma, when Yalitza Aparicio (as the put-upon family maid) has a terrifying pregnancy complication, Cuarón still has the movie be about complex visual setups and long uncut takes and other things that draw your attention to his directing, not what the character is suffering. Cuarón is like Spielberg in that sense — he’s always gonna be better wrangling the robot shark or the spinning space station wreck than he is the people.

That’s not to say people can’t be affecting in Cuarón’s movies; Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are in Gravity, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine and Clare-Hope Ashitey are in Children of Men, Maribel Verdú is here. It’s just that, to Cuarón, the primary excitement of moviemaking seems to be playing with “the best train set a boy could ever have,” as Orson Welles put it. It’s not a bad reason to want to make movies, and it’s at least respecting the audience enough to give them something interesting to look at. But I want more. When a movie tries to razzle-dazzle me and “have a heart” at the same time, I don’t feel the heart in it, and I enjoy the razzle-dazzle less than I’d like to.

From around the end of the 1960s to just a few years ago, it was seen as very “mature” to have sex scenes in movies, and the way that made actors feel was considered irrelevant. Now, it’s become more common to have “intimacy coordinators” on set, who help make the performers as comfortable as possible, the same way you’d have a stunt coordinator do a fight scene so that nobody’s face actually gets bashed in. Some older actors have griped that this is too wimpy, they didn’t need such things back in their day, and I understand that perspective. If I learned to ride a bike by falling down 100 times and scraping my elbows off, I’d somewhat resent the invention of training wheels. But if I was the one in charge of teaching a kid how to ride, today? I’d absolutely want those training wheels on.

I’ve liked some recent movies with sexual themes! I thought Sanctuary with Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott as two young adults doing a ton of kinky role-playing was pretty clever and frequently funny. It’s not the kind of thing which whets my whistle, but I don’t watch movies for that. I absolutely loved Emma Thompson as a prim older widow who nervously hires sex worker Daryl McCormack in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. That’s a fantastic movie I’d strongly recommend to just about anybody over 16, and it’s 95% talk. I admired how Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn made the strong point that there are things in our modern world FAR more obscene than pornography. (That is NOT one I’d recommend to everybody, just people who’re willing to try a certain kind of offbeat movie.)

Here, the best thing was Maribel Verdú yelling, “You get babies to look after, you end up changing their diapers!” She’s referring to the boyos, and I felt exactly the same way. Give me movies that make us laugh about sex, that challenge us about it, not ones that have Sensual Bathtub Scenes (this doesn’t, but it gets close enough). Hot teens are hot! Zzzzzz. I’d rather go watch a pre-Code movie, to tell you the truth.

Being There (1979). Grade: C-

Everybody’s wrong sometimes; me, only every hour decade or so. When I wrote about The Last Detail, I mentioned how Hal Ashby had such an amazing career in the 1970s, with seven movies, all of which were worth watching. And I’ll stand by that with at least Detail, The Landlord, Harold and Maude, and Shampoo. Mayyyybe not the ones after that, so much… I haven’t seen ‘em in awhile. And definitely not Being There.

I remember just thinking this was the deepest movie ever when I saw it the first time, and Roger Ebert agreed. But I would have been about 20 when I saw this the first time. What was Rog’s excuse? (He even used this movie in a film course. Ebert seems like he was a nice enough guy who loved a lotta movies, so maybe the others were fun, but having to praise this in a class essay would be awful. It’s enough to make you wish those students had had AI.)

The credited screenplay’s by Jerry Kosiński, based on his 1971 novel. I haven’t read it and don’t wish to, but if the movie’s fairly close to the book, it would have made a little more sense in 1971. By 1979, the premise was badly dated.

Your plot’s about a simpleton whose vast ignorance and timidity is mistaken for serene genius by first a small, then a GIGANTIC number of people. And maybe that fits in 1971, when things like fly-by-night New Age thinking were popular. But by the end of the decade, interest in Gurus for Honkies had fallen off quite a bit (except for strange pockets like the Rajneeshees in central Oregon a few years later). The ascendant comfort foods of the public were bile-filled mass-marketing campaigns launched by the likes of Phyllis Schlafly and Richard Viguerie. Nobody was hoping for a gentle simpleton; they were hoping for mean and dumb. And they’ve increasingly gotten it.

Peter Sellers plays the simpleton, Chance. He works as a gardener for a rich old man in D.C., and was raised in the rich old man’s house from infancy by the kindly Black maid, Ruth Attaway. When the old man dies, Sellers doesn’t know what to do, so he just stays in the house, gardens, and watches television. Eventually, lawyers from the estate1 show up and question Sellers. Before he knows what they’re talking about, they’ve kicked him out.

Sellers wanders the streets of D.C. with only his umbrella, suitcase, and a TV remote control (it’s his favorite possession). Eventually he’s confronted by a Black street gang, who mistake him for a messenger from a rival gang. When one of the youths pulls a knife on Sellers, he lifts his remote and clicks it a few times. He looks confused; why didn’t the channel change?

That might read on the screen as if it’s describing a funny situation, and maybe with a different actor in the part it might have been funny. But this was Sellers’s dream baby. Per Jeff Stafford of TCM, after the book came out, book author Kosiński “‘soon found himself bombarded by telegrams, cards, and letters from Sellers signed “Chance.’” Sidney Gottlieb’s review of the Criterion disc says that in extra features included on the disc, Sellers explains his strong identification with the character. How Sellers was “motivated by his conviction that he himself truly was Chance: someone without a stable sense of self; an impersonator rather than a person; a thoroughgoing orphan, fundamentally and irrevocably disconnected from others.”

In other words, Peter Sellers felt awfully sorry for himself and how lonely he was. It might have helped if he hadn’t been a gigantic bully and a d**k. At least that’s how Geoffrey Rush played him in HBO’s The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (a grim movie with a good performance by Rush), and nothing I’ve read about Sellers since gives me any reason to think differently. (Although he might have had a lot of untreated mental health issues that contributed to his behavior.) Sellers routinely mistreated/cheated on his wives2 and, when his teenage daughter criticized his appearance in Being There, Sellers threw a drink at her and disowned her (and her sister). In the 60s Sellers got along famously with director Stanley Kubrick, and maybe it was because Kubrick was also a bully and a d**k (at least on set and to his co-contributors, he was). Game respecting game?

That felling sorry for himself aspect of his performance sucks any fun whatsoever out of the Sellers character here. It feels like we’re being asked to share in Sellers’s self-loathing, and find the way that other characters miss what an empty nothingburger he is to be the movie’s one, hilarious joke. It’s alright as a joke, at times; having the wry Melvyn Douglas and the generally amusing Jack Warden find Sellers “wise” can make you grin, a little. (It doesn’t hurt that the movie is saying how our richest and most powerful can be taken in by morons — which, in the case of certain South African car company moguls, has definitely proved true.) But it’s dang near not enough of a joke for 130 minutes. And when one of the people being fooled is Shirley MacLaine, the movie feels cruel.

MacLaine’s in a limo that accidentally hits Sellers (when he’s staring in fascination at a store window that has a video camera and television; he’s seeing himself on TV, and it’s the greatest thing ever). To avoid a potential lawsuit, MacLaine takes Sellers back home to her rich husband Douglas’s mansion and has him looked at by their private doctor (Richard Dysart, later of L.A. Law). Douglas becomes enraptured by Sellers because he takes Sellers’s idiotic statements about gardening to be an agreement with his supply-side political beliefs. MacLaine falls romantically for Sellers because he’s quiet, seems gentle, and eventually has no response to her sexual advances.

If the script was funnier, or Hal Ashby was in a funnier mood, having a rich, bored wife of around 45 throwing herself at a nonsexual man might have been amusing; if, for example, she assumed he was just gay. But the movie has her misinterpret Sellers’s statement that he “likes to watch” (he means TV), and so she masturbates instead. Sound demeaning to you? It sure feels like it to me. It’s done in PG-13 fashion, there’s nothing explicit, but it feels demeaning to the character. Shirley MacLaine deserves better than this. (And would get better parts later in movies like Postcards From the Edge and Bernie.)

Plus, MacLaine in the limo sees Sellers watching the most inane material on TV that Ashby and his editors can find. Why doesn’t she put it together that he’s half a bubble off plum? Because the dumb script says so. (Ashby wasn’t crazy about the draft Kosiński turned in at first, so he hired Robert Jones, who’d scripted his recent Coming Home, to do a punch-up. This script does not make me eager to re-watch Coming Home.)

The subject of “TV is turning us all into morons” had also been addressed in the recent Sidney Lumet / Paddy Chayefsky movie Network, and there it was done in an obvious, message-y, ham-handed way as well. Really, people are quite capable of being morons on their own, and were back in the days before TV (or radio, or movies) existed. There’s some evidence to the idea that TV has done a little to reduce people’s attention spans, and the Sellers character here is shown as the ultimate example of how that turns you into a dingbat. But, then, why have him be a gardener, and apparently a pretty good one? Someone who’s an expert on and cares about plant life is someone who’s patient and willing to constantly learn. In this script, it’s only so Sellers can spout inanities about the cyclical nature of growth and have characters believe he’s predicting economic activity.

There’s some formal aspects to the movie which aren’t entirely off-putting. The cinematography, by Caleb Deschanel, is very decent; he’s good at getting texture into his images, and would be in movies like The Right Stuff as well. The music, by Johnny Mandel, grates when it’s being used an in overtly sarcastic way, and it did in other scores by Mandel, too. When it’s being used to suggest the dullness of rich, “cultured” people, it’s alright (and was based on some classical pieces). The movie was shot at/inside the gargantuan Biltmore estate, built by George Washington Vanderbilt II at the end of the 19th century. It’s certainly large. This also cause me to wonder if any member of the Vanderbilt family makes movies, and one does, he wrote Zodiac. It’s nice for rich people to have a hobby. News personage Anderson Cooper and Deadwood actor Timothy Olyphant are members of the family as well.

This is one really unrewarding watch that’s oddly considered a classic by some. I won’t say they’re wrong, but I’m just not getting it. About the only thing in the movie that rang true to me is once Sellers achieves (of course) a level of accidental TV fame, and Ruth Attaway, the former maid at the house Sellers lived at, sees him on TV. She says: “It's for sure a white man's world in America. Look here: I raised that boy since he was the size of a piss-ant. And I'll say right now, he never learned to read and write. No, sir. Had no brains at all. Was stuffed with rice pudding between th' ears. Shortchanged by the Lord, and dumb as a jackass. Look at him now! Yes, sir, all you've gotta be is white in America, to get whatever you want.”

That is sometimes true. It also helps if you have a famous last name and a brainworm.

The ending here aims at something mythic/poetic; for my money, it’s not even close. If you don’t mind spoilers, you can read about what Roger Ebert thought of it here. Ebert, as mentioned, taught a movie course featuring this film, and wouldn’t allow his students to talk about HOW the ending was shot, only WHAT the ending means.3 I’d have said “it means Hal Ashby was out of ideas” and flunked. (Ashby had become sadly addicted to cocaine in the mid-70s, as many in showbiz did aat that time. It generally wasn’t a real creativity booster.)

Fans of the film should definitely check out this loaded CinephilaBeyond page. It’s got several short “making of” videos, and a diary kept by a film student/intern on the set. The site also has a three-part, three-hour documentary called The Peter Sellers Story: As He Filmed It which has footage of the actor and people talking about him. Including, apparently, Stanley Kubrick playing tennis in a business suit.

Even those who don’t love this movie, but like some of Hal Ashby’s other work, should read this DeepFocusReview essay by Brian Eggert. A short ways in, there’s a good mini-bio of Ashby. He was born into a Utah farm family in 1929, and when he was 12, discovered his dad’s body in the barn; he’d shot himself. At 20, Ashby became a drifter (abandoning his wife / child), and he made his way across the county doing odd jobs before winding up in California in the late 40s. Ashby went to a state employment assistance office and asked for a job in movies. They got him a job copying papers at Universal. From there he worked his way up, becoming an assistant editor and then editor, and established a friendship with director Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night). Jewison helped Ashby get his first directing assignment with The Landlord in 1970.

I’d say stick to that movie, and Ashby’s other early-70s stuff, for now. Dare Bound For Glory and Coming Home at your own risk. And probably avoid Being There. Even if you’re a fan of Sellers — and I am not a huge one, but there were times his physical inventiveness or deadpan expressions could make me laugh — this isn’t Sellers being funny. It’s Sellers being a mopey phony cipher. There’s no there in Being There.

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The Border (1982). Grade: C+. Highway Patrolman or El patrullero (1991). Grade: B-

Years ago, I spent about three weeks as a “utility locator.” What is that?

That’s a job where you find where underground cables or pipes are, using special equipment that transmits a low-wattage radio signal into the ground, and then a radio receiver which makes noises as you wave it around. Kind of like metal detecting, using slightly different tech. When you find where the pipe/cable is, you spray paint the ground. Red is for electric line, blue for water, green (!) for sewer, and yellow for natural gas. Our company found natural gas. This lets construction companies know where NOT to dig.

The thing is, sometimes finding the pipe is trickier than other times. If you go too fast, you might make a mistake. And if there’s anything you REALLY don’t want, its a ruptured gas line. If a gas line ruptures and catches fire, they’ll have to evacuate a square mile around it, at least.

But the company didn’t care. They just wanted you to go as fast as possible, so they made the most money. And it became increasingly clear that since this bothered me, I wasn’t welcome at that job.

If you work at a compromised (or outright corrupt) job, you can’t just try to be true to your own principles and look the other way at what others are doing. Because they won’t be looking the other way at you. Your trying to perform your job with integrity is seen as an insult or a threat to everyone else. And I’ve faced this in other workplaces, too. (Like professional “tax preparation” companies, who WANT you to screw the customer over. If you ever pay someone to do your taxes — hire a CPA!)

That the problem faced by Jack Nicolson’s character in The Border, and Roberto Sosa’s in Highway Patrolman. They’re inside corrupt institutions. They’d like to be left alone to do their jobs with honesty. Yet that’s making their bosses and co-workers awfully nervous.

In The Border, Nicholson’s an immigration enforcement officer living in a trailer in the L.A. area with wife Valerie Perrine (“Miss Teschmacher” from Superman). L.A.’s an expensive place to live, so Perrine figures they can make his federal paycheck go further in El Paso, Texas. Where she’s got a friend. Nicholson is NOT excited about the idea of living in El Paso, but he understands why his wife would prefer a duplex to a trailer. Away they go. Nicholson’s gonna transfer to the Border Patrol.

In El Paso, Nicholson’s thrown into the fire right away; the partner he’s assigned to is killed by gunfire almost as soon as Nicholson’s met the guy. Then, during a raid, one of the fleeing migrant workers gets caught by a train and dragged along the ground; Nicholson risks his own life to save him. Losing a partner in the line of duty, and being physically brave, get Nicholson the respect of his fellow officers. For awhile.

But then they straighten Nicholson out on how things are done around here. His boss, Warren Oates, strongly suggests Nicholson “fit in.” And one of his colleagues, Harvey Keitel, explains what that means. It means not just looking the other way, it means actively working with “coyotes” (human smugglers) to provide day laborers for low-paying local businesses. And taking a cut of what the coyotes make.

I don’t know if the Border Patrol was exactly this corrupt in 1982, but I’m sure some such corruption did exist. You’ve got people patrolling miles and miles of mostly-empty desert, by themselves. The opportunities for payoffs by human smugglers are rampant. (Drug smugglers too, although to a far lesser degree — the vast majority of drugs come into the U.S. at regular checkpoints.) And, with an unofficial policy of “torment anybody brown” but an equal mandate to do this less with agricultural workers, I’m sure today’s border enforcement is the most corrupt it’s ever been.

Amidst all this, Nicholson latches on to one thing he hopes will “make me feel good.” He’s had some random interactions with a young Mexican mother of two, Elpidia Carrillo; in one, she helped him get back some stolen hubcaps. In another, he witnessed her baby getting swiped by smugglers (who plan to sell it to adoptive American parents for big money). Nicholson’s gonna make it his mission to find Carrillo’s baby. And somehow avoid being railroaded by Keitel & Oates. (“Keitel & Oates” should be the name of an 80s duo that records soft-rock ballads like “You Gotta Fuggin Problem With That?”)

This is directed by Tony Richardson, a Brit who did fine “kitchen sink” dramas in England in the 50s and 60s. (Dramas that showed the depressing side of postwar English society.) His The Entertainer, with Laurence Olivier as a cynical, fading, vulgar stage comedian, is well worth a watch just for Olivier’s intense, bitter performance.

And this one’s worth a watch just for Nicholson’s increasingly intense performance. This isn’t the manic, yelly Jack of The Last Detail and Cuckoo’s Nest; yet it’s not the self-mocking Jack we’d get from Terms of Endearment onward, either. This guy is, for the most part, stuffing down how frustrated and hopeless he feels, but he’s not feeling sorry for himself. He’s too worried about Carrillo’s baby for that. Finding the baby becomes kind of the one thing that can redeem how corrupt the world is around him. There’s one moment where Nicholson smacks Valerine Perrine, and he immediately apologizes sincerely. It’s not a violent man, it’s a man pushed to violence by the desperation of his situation.

Keitel is calmly wicked as Nicholson’s bent colleague, someone who’s perfectly willing to meet Jack halfway just so long as he engages in SOME corruption. Which Nicholson is at least tempted to try; because Perrine is running up credit-card bills like crazy. (She wants the high life other Border Patrol wives have, and they don’t tell her it’s coming from payoff money.) Perrine definitely reminds me of some types my parents knew in the 80s, who imagined that credit cards and Kmart layaway was just a temporary solution until their families got better-paying jobs again. (It would rarely work out that way.)

Warren Oates as the bent supervisor is WAY less irritating than Warren Oates generally was. Only Jeff Morris as a guy on the American side of the trafficking operation is repellently nasty; but it’s worth it for the gruesomely fun sendoff he gets at the end.

The original ending had an utterly disillusioned Nicholson bombing the Border Patrol office; they reshot it later for an extra $2 million. (Seems like a lot!) I agree that ending would have sucked, but the tacked-on action climax they use instead here is pretty terrible, with machinery mashing all around and killing baddies. Richardon’s direction of “big” action scenes, frankly, sucks (like an earthquake at the beginning). He’s much better in the smaller moments with the actors.

The script’s by David Freeman, Walon Green, and Deric Washburn, and it ain’t great; it’s rather confusing at times. The “eh” score’s by Ry Cooder, who did session work on some decent Stones albums. The “eh” cinematography’s by Ric Waite. Every now and then you’ll suddenly see a really good shot; those were probably done by Vilmos Zsigmond, who did around 10% of this before an actors’ strike halted production.

Yet the quiet part of the ending is satisfying enough; Nicholson’s managed to get at least a shred of his self-respect back. The movie’s a (barely) decent-enough attempt to at least try to take the issue of corruption, sadism, and hypocrisy in our long-broken border “enforcement” system somewhat seriously. There haven’t been many such since.

Alex Cox’s Highway Patrolman is about different kinds of corruption; there’s the obvious level, where we’re looking at the corruption of Mexican highway cops. (Who’re trained to pull over a vehicle first, then find a violation later; there’s always a reason to write a ticket.) There’s also the corruption of Hollywood, which by this point had utterly rejected the independent-minded Cox.

This was regarded as a “comeback” movie for Cox, who (as per the poster) had done the cult favorite Repo Man and underground success Sid and Nancy. Well, Repo Man really doesn’t hold up well at all, and Sid and Nancy is only worth watching for the balls-out performance by Gary Oldman as doomed Sex Pistols frontman Sid Vicious. Cox’s Walker, a musing on past/present American interference in Central America, got poor reviews and flopped financially. (It’s better-liked by some today, and I’ve never seen it.) The overtly political nature of Walker, and having written some work during a writers’ strike, got Cox essentially kicked out of the movie business. (I agree that you shouldn’t cross the line during a strike, but Hollywood movies shoot overseas all the time to avoid paying American union film techs. How’s that any different?)

Roberto Sosa plays the young police trainee here, who’s mighty proud of his new rifle, badge, and shiny car he’s been assigned. (And told that “if there’s a scratch on it, I’ll kick your a**” by his supervisor.) Sosa heads on out to his first assignment, and is trying to enforce the law, but soon finds out that’s not his REAL job. He tries demanding that a truck driver produce the proper permits, and the annoyed truck driver just assumes it’s an attempt to jack up the cost of a bribe. His supervisors are frustrated with Sosa for not writing enough bulls**t tickets; his wife, Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez, demands that Sosa starts bringing in more money, and doesn’t care where it comes from.

The movie cleverly makes use of Sosa’s car to visually represent his declining belief in his job; before long, he’s moved from the shiny new one to the worst on the lot. And before long, he’s been roughed up himself, too; you’ve got this former idealist trying to cling onto a shred of honesty and chase lawbreakers in his smoking heap junker with his new, permanent limp.

The main story eventually becomes his support of prostitute Vanessa Bauche, who’s developed a dangerous cocaine addiction; it’s Sosa’s goal to get her back to her mountain village with her family. The walk Sosa takes over a huge, long, narrow, very high bridge to get to the village is visually stunning and rather funny at the same time; Cox and cinematographer Miguel Garzon use the ginormous Mexican landscape to show how puny Sosa is against the forces in play.

That cinematography isn’t perfect; there’s an over-reliance on hand-held cameras that sometimes works (when it’s giving us a shot that would be difficult to lay tracks for) and sometimes doesn’t (when it’s used indoors just to make this seem like “caught” footage, which usually calls attention to how artificial the shaking camera is). Even so, whenever you’re annoyed by how one scene is staged, the next will be unusual and clever in some way that grabs your attention. Cox’s essay/notes about this film calls Mexico “the most visually stimulating place on earth,” and the movie certainly doesn’t disprove the notion.

The script (by Cox’s frequent collaborator Lorenzo O’Brien) isn’t perfect either; it’s a little too shaggy-road movie in nature. (You probably could have lost about 10 minutes off the run time.) Yet the actors are a real delight, including Sosa, Gutiérrez, Bauche, and Bruno Bichir as Sosa’s easier-to-corrupt buddy. (Bichir is the brother of the fine actor Demián Bichir.) Eduardo López Rojas makes a nice appearance as a ghostly figure, and Pedro Armendáriz Jr. is amusingly brusque as the head trainer at the cop academy. (For fans of cheesy British movies, Pedro Armendáriz Jr. appeared as a corrupt politico in the Bond movie License to Kill, and Pedro Armendáriz Sr. was Bond’s Turkish buddy in From Russia With Love.)

I don’t quite buy the ending here (where’s Sosa gonna get the money for it?) but I like it anyways; it’s hopeful without feeling schmaltzy. Cox writes that part of his goal was to show the basic decency of the Mexican people despite the corruption of the cops and the politicos (and the rotten treatment of Mexico by their northern “ally”). How ‘“God helps the bad when they outnumber the good.” And yet it is essential that we do the right thing, as we can, that we not behave as badly as the monsters that confront us, that we have our own code, and do our best to live by it… Mexico is a great teacher of this lesson.’”

It’s a less grim movie than The Border, because Mexico (while poorer than the US today) is a less grim country. It was a nice balancing point to that movie, and because of that I didn’t wanna wait for the library to have it. I know, I know — support libraries! (And filmmakers, who get small royalties from the purchase of library DVDs.) But sometimes it’s OK not to wait. And, for now, there’s a perfectly good print on the TubeYou.

Incidentally, while the real Mexican highway patrol weren’t thrilled with how the script depicted them, they didn’t give the production any trouble, so long as the uniforms/police cars didn’t look like the real life ones. Can you imagine American cops (or border agents) being quite so accommodating? When Sidney Lumet was filming Serpico, the police refused to provide protection for the parts shot in NYC locations (which just resulted in a little more authentic NYC pedestrian chaos in some shots). And Serpico was a movie about a GOOD cop, one trying to make the system better! Like I said up top — some institutions just aren’t really comfortable with anyone trying to do things the right way.

Incidentally, while the version available on DVD is by Kino Lorber, one writer imagined what a Criterion disc website would be like (Criterion three other Alex Cox movies). With a very Criterion-style decent essay, too! In fact that site has a couple hundred suggested Criterion packages. The site went on hiatus in 2023, and at least a few of their suggestions HAVE become Criterion releases since! Poke around on the site sometime; a lot of clever stuff on there.

Carrie (1976). Grade: B

The character of Carrie White was almost played by Carrie Fisher, and Amy Irving almost appeared in Fisher’s role in Star Wars. During the casting for the latter, one of George Lucas’s friends was hovering in the background, taking notes. That friend was Brian De Palma, and Lucas let him sit in on his auditions so long as Lucas had first dibs on anybody he wanted for the roles.

I always found it weird that Lucas, De Palma, Spielberg and Coppola ended up friendly. With Lucas and Coppola, both liked basing their work out of the Bay Area, and both were (at one point) independent filmmakers. Spielberg and Lucas obviously shared a love of sci-fi and adventure movies.

De Palma was more of a prankster than the other three, and the least interested in giving audiences just what they wanted. In Pauline Kael’s review of The Fury, she wrote how in Close Encounters, “what happens is so much better than you dared hope that you have to laugh; with De Palma, it's so much worse than you feared that you have to laugh.”

In Vincent Canby’s NYT review of Carrie (he didn’t like the movie), he complains that this is “the most benignly unscary horror film ever made,” and I’ll mostly agree — I don’t find most if the big “horror” scenes to be remotely frightening. But that’s not the point of the movie. The point is to put you inside Carrie’s head, so that the true horror is what’s done to her. She’s horribly emotionally (and almost physically) abused by her mom; she’s the shy girl at school that ALL the others pick on. And the one time she feels she might have a life-line, she gets terribly betrayed (or at least thinks she is). So that the way she reacts is not recommended to others, yet you’re totally right there with it. It’s the scream of a broken soul.

This is adapted from Stephen King’s 1974 novel, his first to be published. I haven’t read it, and it appears to be something of an oddity. I’ve mentioned how every book I’ve read by King (mostly his 21st-century work) has a protagonist (or two) I really care about and want to do well. In King’s books, that sometimes happens… and it sometimes doesn’t. There’s happy and tragic endings, both.

There’s been good film adaptations of King’s work (the Mike Flanagan ones, The Dead Zone, Misery), and bad (most of the 80’s ones without Tim Curry in them). But I’ve never seen a King movie where I’m emotionally wrapped up in the fate of the protagonists the way I am in the books. Until we watched this one. The degree to which I actually cared what happened to Carrie was really strong.

Well, guess what? That’s NOT in the book! Not according to Tim Robey here; in the book, the character’s apparently “unsympathetic.” (That might be a function of how King framed it, as a series of letters and articles trying to piece together “what happened” after the fact.) And the character’s physically far different from what Sissy Spacek looks like. But even King liked Spacek in it; and he generally was pretty critical of movies made from his books.

The adaptation’s by one Lawrence D. Cohen (with De Palma’s input). It’s not an especially graceful script, particularly where the dialogue is concerned. But it simplifies the narrative and makes a key change; in the book, Carrie feels betrayed, thinks it over for awhile, then acts; in the movie, she reacts immediately. It makes the actions more as though something in her heart has snapped.

Right from the start, the movie sets up how awful everything is for Carrie (Sissy Spacek, in her second major film role). It’s one of those awful ways of doing gym class where the class rotates through doing a different sport every few weeks,1 and this time the class is doing volleyball. Someone screams “hit it at Carrie” and as the camera glides closer to Spacek, we see the ball fly by and Spacek miserably flail at it. Everybody mocks her for being such a loser.

Then we’re in the locker room, and the girls are showering, and you may have to remind yourself that these are all women in their early 20s, we’re not seeing nekkid teens, here. Still, the scene feels pretty exploitative… until Spacek ends up with blood running down her leg. She has no idea what it is; she’s never heard of menstruation. (Not even in a 1970s educational film featuring Mike from Breaking Bad?) Spacek, terrified, asks the other girls for help and they become brutal, hurling insults and tampons at her as she cowers naked in the shower. (On a “Acting Carrie” feature on the MGM DVD, Amy Irving said this scene actually scared her; it was like she could sense real mob mentality at work.)

When Spacek gets sent home early, she’s chewed out by her fundamentalist mom, Piper Laurie. Laurie tells her that “the curse” only happened because Spacek had impure, sinful thoughts. So she drags her into a prayer closet and tells her to beg God for forgiveness. The closet, and other parts of the house, are full of creepy religious imagery that may strike you as so over-the-top that they’re funny; guess what, both some modern critics and Kael in 1976 thought the film had a wickedly funny side. So, for that matter, did Piper Laurie.

Laurie, so memorable in The Hustler, had put acting on hiatus shortly after that movie was made; she didn’t like the quality of scripts she was getting. So she moved to the Woodstock area. De Palma found out that one of the studio executives at United Artists had a house in Woodstock near Laurie, and she’d expressed a willingness to try acting again, given a good-enough part. Once Laurie saw the humor in the script, she was in.

It’s a towering bughouse performance, right from an early scene where Laurie is trying to push some crummy religious literature on a neighbor (not even a Bible, but a guidebook on how to be a terrible parent like herself). While Spacek is all adolescent gawkiness, Laurie (at 44) is someone who’s incredibly sensual (even in her witchlike robes) and intensely proud of how much she scorns herself for it. There’s a late scene where she’s revealing her own past of “lustful thoughts” to Spacek, and it’s like Laurie is burning with joy at how painfully it’s adding to her daughter’s humiliation.2 Whenever these two are on the screen together, the movie hits actual horror heaven.

The scenes with the other teens aren’t anywhere near as compelling, although there’s a neat dynamic that develops between Amy Irving and Nancy Allen (both in their first major roles). After the girls humiliate Spacek in the locker room, their gym teacher (Betty Buckley, also a movie newcomer) is determined to make them pay for how mean they were; they’re got detention for a week, and if they skip any of it, they’re going to lose their prom privileges. Allen, a prototypical mega-Mean Girl, is infuriated by this, and blames Carrie for it all the more; Irving tries to tell her to get over herself. The message doesn’t land.

Brian De Palma, who gave us the mad (and brilliant) Phantom of the Paradise, is partially doing what he did in that movie — throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. You had a camera moving in a circle around a singer there? Now you’ve got a camera moving around a dancing couple here, and it’s FASTER. (Mrs. twinsbrewer hated it and had to look away.) You had split screens there? You’ve got ‘em again here (and not as effectively). Some of De Palma’s wild “try everything” approach doesn’t work; there’s too much buildup right before the big climax. But then again he’ll do something like a long tracking shot moving up into the rafters above a stage, and all his visual trickery seems worth it.

And De Palma’s got Sissy Spacek. She was married to the production designer of Phantom, Jack Fisk (they’re still married!), and did some crew work on that film. De Palma wanted her to try out for one of the Mean Girl parts. But Spacek had read the book and really wanted the Carrie role, so she showed up for the audition with Vaseline in her hair and an old “sailor dress” her mom had made for her in junior high, to look as pathetic as she possibly could. She got the part.

Spacek IS pathetic in the movie, yet undergoes a neat transformation. Gradually, she starts to gain a little self-confidence, bit-by-bit. Out of guilt, Amy Irving asks her dreamboat athlete boyfriend (William Katz, another first-timer) to take Spacek to the prom, and in working up the courage to defy Laurie, we see Spacek starting to shine. She’s gone from mousy to beautiful. It makes you long for the change to last… even though the plot has strongly indicated that it’s not gonna work out for long. I can’t believe there’s been TWO remakes of this already — who would want to try and top Spacek in this role? It’s idiocy to even think about it. (Idiocy on the part of the filmmakers who tried, not the actors playing Carries, who I’m sure did their best.)

There was also a Broadway musical version! Larry Cohen, who did this screenplay, appears in a short featurette on the DVD talking about it — I guess he was involved with the musical, too (which had nice gym teacher Betty Buckley from this move playing the Piper Laurie role). Cohen gushes about how great the musical was, and he’s a boring, pompous ass. What he doesn’t say is that it cost $6 million, it closed in three days, and inspired a book called Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops.

Cohen’s in the featurette “Visualizing Carrie,” too, and ruins it. But that “Acting Carrie” one, about 40 minutes long, is really entertaining. It has interviews with Irving, Allen, Spacek, Laurie, Katz, Betty Buckley, and P.J. Soles (who played one of the other Mean Girls). They talk about how the shower scene was as embarrasssing/uncomfortable as you’d expect. How DePalma made Buckley keep slapping Allen for real several time. (BAD Brian! BAD Brian!) And how the general mayhem of a big scene was really pretty harrowing; Soles got water so hard in her ear that it broke her eardrum! (It did heal just fine.)

Yet all of them seem to have, overall, positive memories about the experience; they at least all liked each other. It’s nice to know that in the shower scene, the person in the shower putting the fake blood on Spacek was her husband, Fisk. (He also dumped other things on her, including pumice, which was her idea.)

The score here’s by Pino Donaggio, who’d do the luxuriant music for Dressed to Kill.3 The cinematography’s by Mario Tosi. Both elements can be entirely “too much” at times, like during that shower scene. But when they click, they REALLY click. As Spacek approaches her house near the end, with the colors all aglow and the music propelling her forward, it’s one of the great moments in all of horror movie history; this lighting, this music, Spacek’s body language have a majesty like Elsa Lanchester’s revulsion in Bride of Frankenstein.

This site, one of those “83 facts about Movie X” ones, has some stuff on it that might be dubious,4 but here’s one I believe. De Palma wanted some of the visual design to resemble a 1851 painting by Gustave Moreau called The Study of Lady Macbeth, another “woman scorned.” Here’s what that painting looks like:

Yep, that’s definitely some imagery which is similar to the big climax of the movie here.

This is a movie that might bring back some uncomfortable memories for people — it reminded me of how much everyone at our high school hated our senior prom and just felt awkward and embarrassed. (Spacek said the worst thing about it for her was having to wear makeup.) But the power — and the high Gothic humor — of those Spacek/Laurie scenes makes this a must-see despite the uncomfortable subject, and despite some of the sloppy try-everything flaws.

It’s too bad that I can’t think of too many movies where someone’s religious faith is shown in a positive light rather than a crazed-fundamentalist one. At least, not Christianity, not very often. (Thirteen Lives showed how the trapped people’s Buddhist faith helped them survive.) I suppose that’s what religious faith in movies deserves, though, after 50 years of Cecil B. DeMille movies like The Sign of the Cross and other patronizing crap. (That one’s gaudily amusing patronizing crap.) But there are some good documentaries about nice Christians! The Overnighters about a North Dakota pastor who tries to help homeless oil rig workers. A Time For Burning about a Lutheran minister who tries to integrate his church in 1960s Nebraska. Which, guess what, you can watch right here.

For those of us who knew fundamentalism in our personal lives, there’s something refreshing about seeing its naked need for total domination played as boldly as Laurie plays it here. Or to see it go down the way it does at the end. Where Spacek’s embodying the Id of every teenager who ever had their mind warped by twisted judgmental teachings on sexuality. Which, even today, is not a zero number.

The Terminal (2004). Grade: C

In a 2004 promo interview with Total Film, Steven Spielberg is pretty generous with his super-famous time to someone who was probably a pretty young interviewer. That’s a nice thing! He also says “this is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.”

Um… I guess that’s nice. But it’s also a bit condescending. (Like Jean Hagen in Singin’ in the Rain: “if we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives…”). And also a strange notion of what makes people “smile more” and a strange notion of what “difficult times” are.

I imagine he was referring to the Depression, when Hollywood sometimes turned out some fairly fun things (like gangster movies and Busby Berkeley musicals) which people could enjoy and, as it is said, “forget about their troubles” for a few hours.

No movie has ever been good enough or fun enough to make me forget about things I’m worried about when I’m really worried. I’d actually prefer something kinda mind-numbingly dumb. But, that said, some of those 30s action movies or musicals or comedies are really cleverly done, which is why they’re still good today. The Terminal is… not really cleverly done. (Although Tom Hanks is about as good as you could be in it.)

Also, in the Depression, people were worried about Having No Money and Starving (or the possibility they could be in that situation soon enough). What were people worried about in 2004?

They were worried about a stupid idiotic war that was started by stupid idiotic power-mad sadists and defended entirely on the basis of “if you’re against this war, you want The Terrorists to win.” (I even heard Democrats tell me that — ones who had lived in the Depression.)

Maybe Spielberg was referring to another difficult time, another time of war? WWII? We know he’s a big WWII buff. Hollywood made some entertaining movies during that war. (It also made a lot of OK movies whose worst moments were “rah-rah our side” propaganda. The fact that Paul Henreid gets people to sing “La Marsellaise” in a bar in Casablanca is all well and good, but the French Resistance didn’t do much about defeating the Nazis.)

But really, after 1945, if you had a knee-jerk opposition to every single war America got involved in, you were generally proven to have been on the right side all along. No matter how unpopular that position might have been at first.

I think what Spielberg is kinda going with The Terminal is well-intentioned. I think he’s trying to push back against the xenophobia that was rampant in America at the time. (Xenophobia’s always here, it just focuses on different targets at different periods… like Japanese people during WWII, Arabs/Muslims after September 2001, Asians again during COVID, Muslims again now… these things are depressingly cyclical.)

Yet good intentions do not a good movie make. And for a movie with good intentions, The Terminal is really weak-kneed. It doesn’t mention the war in Iraq, and of the many multicultural characters we see, none of the major ones is Arabic. That’s like making a movie about tolerance during WWII and not having any Japanese-American characters in it. (Which actually might not have been allowed by any of the studio heads during that war… but Spielberg essentially IS a studio head. He could make a movie about flat-earth theory if he wanted to.)

You plot is, Tom Hanks is a vacationer arriving in New York and planning to see the sights. But… his home country of Krakozhia (a fictional Eastern European nation) has undergone a military coup while he was mid-air. The government has collapsed, and the U.S. hasn’t recognized the provisional government yet. So Hanks’s passport is from a country that no longer exists.

An unfortunate situation, to be sure. But why, then, doesn’t the US government just politely tell Hanks he’s refused entry at this time and pull the necessary strings to bump up his return flight from Later to Now? It sucks for Hanks, he’s out an expensive ticket, yet these things can happen. Maybe if the airline is Krakozhian and survives the coup, he could ask for a refund.

Because this script is gimmicky, it invents an unbelievable dilemma for airport security administrator Stanley Tucci. For some unclear reason, Tucci can’t just send Hanks back. Nor can he let him into the US. Hanks could go back, but he doesn’t want to until he’s seen New York first. And he doesn’t want to apply for refugee status, either; he plans on going back after his visit. So, until there’s a way to force him to leave, he’s just gonna stay in the terminal.

This was loosely inspired by the story of a real Iranian man, Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who lived in the terminal of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years. His story is very complex (and possibly involves sad mental illness), but it appears that he likely could have gotten residency in France or Belgium, except he didn’t want it — he wanted to live in Britain, and Britain wouldn’t have him. So he lived in the airport for 18 years off the generosity of strangers, eventually ending up in Paris shelters (and returning to the airport for the last two months before his death). His Wiki page says Spielberg’s DreamWorks production company paid him either $250K or $275K for his life story rights, so that’s nice.

The script here’s by Sasha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story thunked up by Gervasi and Andrew Nicol. (Gervasi later directed the very likable documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil; Nathanson wrote the Rush Hour sequels, and I didn’t know those movies had scripts). It seems like it’s out to capture something of the spirit of It Happened One Night, with the airport workers here being like Gable/Colbert’s fellow bus passengers there. I don’t think that approach fits with Spielberg’s wishy-washy message here about appreciating the diversity of American immigrants; you’re supposed to believe that all the (likely underpaid and overworked) airport staffers are happy pals supporting Hanks and rejoicing as he outwits evil Tucci. I don’t buy it.

Speaking of Tucci, I’d forgotten he was in this, and his name in the cast list made me eager to see it again (which I hadn’t since it was in theaters); well, he’s not much of much here. There’s some roles so badly written that even an actor of Tucci’s caliber can’t save them, and this sure is a fine example. Tucci’s basically being given the part William Atherton had in Ghostbusters — a snivelly underhanded swine of a malevolent Big Gummint employee, who only lives to make his job easier and make innocent travelers miserable. For a movie which (I believe, or I hope) is trying to make a lighthearted rebuke to right-wing anti-immigration jabber, its portrayal of Tucci’s character as a self-interested government functionary who does no real good at all could come right out of the Reagan administration after they fired all those striking air-traffic-controllers.

That’s the thing about trying to make a “mild” political statement movie; it rarely works, and could actually promote the opposite of what it intends to. If this script (and this director) had any guts, they’d have made the evil Tucci character definitely somebody who was parroting Cheney/Rumsfeld-ish talking points. Have the airport workers resisting him because of his rotten bigoted agenda, not just because he’s a mean high school principal (which is all the depth the Tucci bad guy is given).

Spielberg always, without fail, fell horribly flat when he attempted to put any genuine romantic feeling into his movies, and here we don’t just have one awful love plot; we’ve got TWO of them. First, the most egregiously bad; the baggage handler who woos a customs clerk. They’re played by Diego Luna and Zoe Saldaña, both talented and attractive people, although their talents are wasted here. Luna woos Saldaña through Hanks, with him asking questions about her likes/dislikes so that Luna can present himself as the ideal boyfriend. That’s pretty ooky! It’d only be redeemable if it ended the way it did in Roxanne where Daryl Hannah finds out Steve Martin’s been setting her up for his buddy. She pops him one right in the face. Alas, that doesn’t happen here! As Steven Greydanus writes, the resolution is “so unearned that it doesn’t work even as cornball romance.”

The other is Hanks falling for Catherine Zeta-Jones, a flight attendant he bumps into sporadically. Now, it makes perfect sense he’d fall for Jones, because she’s about as lovely and appealing as anybody who’s ever been in movies. But Hanks seems to be falling for her specifically because she’s being routinely mistreated by her older rich lover (who keeps promising to leave his wife, stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before). Why does the movie have to make her such a sad figure? Why doesn’t she know (like everybody else in the dang airport) that Hanks isn’t a traveling contractor, he’s stuck there? Why is Hanks lying to her to begin with? Why is there an oh-so-quirky romantic dinner that leads to nothing, and why is it in the open air when it’s very clear these events are going on in winter? As the BBC put it, despite Zeta-Jones’s glow, “the character's so vapid that whenever she returns from a long-haul flight, you've forgotten she existed in the first place.”

I’m not gonna, like that BBC review, compare this to “standing under a waterfall of vomit for two hours and occasionally being let out for air.” (For one thing, it’s slightly over two hours, which was a mistake.) Spielberg’s direction is enormously cloying in the sappy sequences (so much glitter!), yet there are times he’s got a little zip back; like when he’s playing with a camera that travels huge distances on a wire it’d be impossible for a crane to do.1 The John Williams score is clever enough. The Janusz Kamiński cinematography is excellent (his work always is).

Most of all, you’ve got Hanks. Everybody LIKES Tom Hanks, yet far too often he’s just that, a symbol of decent likability (as in Spielberg’s tepid The Post). Here, Hanks actually gets to act, and he’s very good when given the opportunity to do so. (For example, in Joe Versus the Volcano.) His nervous and grateful expressions suggest a timid-hearted soul with a little Slavic fire smoldering underneath. His accent is vivid without being an affectation; this isn’t Borat. Hanks said he was basing the character on his father-in-law, an immigrant who spoke multiple languages. No wonder the character’s poor (at first) English doesn’t feel the least bit condescending.

You likely won’t hate this movie as much as the BBC did, but it’s not going to make you “smile more” than the average formula comedy would, and unless maybe your grandparents were from Bulgaria or someplace that sounds like Hanks does here, it’s not gonna be as touching as it tries so hard to be. The climax is lousy (and, per Greydanus, was quickly rewritten/reshot after the original one was WORSE). A scene where Hanks “stands up to Tucci” is incredibly misguided. Spielberg can’t do romance.

If you’re a Hanks fan, though, and you haven’t seen this one, give it a watch. It really is a neat performance. You won’t believe in all these airport workers rallying behind Hanks like he’s some kind of folk hero, but you’ll appreciate how Hanks has a little sly glimmer in his eyes here; one we didn’t see much of when Hanks kept playing “the time NASA saved D-Day” or such. But if you’re a Tucci fan… see Big Night instead.

Lampa cu căciulă / The Lamp (or) Tube With a Hat (2006). Grade: B

A boy is pestering his dad about watching a Bruce Lee movie. He says it starts at 6:00, and the dad promised he could watch it. All right, all right, says the dad, we can get going. Which is odd, since the light looks to be in the early morning. How far away is the theater they’re going to watch the movie in?

As it turns out, not far at all, but also quite a hike.

This is apparently based on a short story by Romanian writer Florin Lăzărescu, which you can see bits of here (but translating it is beyond my technological ability). It’s directed by Radu Jude, the then-29-year-old Romanian filmmaker just getting his start with shorts and TV commercials.

Jude would go on to be one of the wildest, edgiest and most prolific Romanian filmmakers around. Just in the last two years, he’s done a version of Dracula updating the legend into modern Romanian politics, a French-language adaptation of a 1900 novel featuring “fractured exposition, temporal dislocations, clashing styles, and varying forms,” a documentary consisting solely of vintage advertisements from the post-Soviet era in Romania, and a remake of/homage to a 1952 Roberto Rossellini film.

We saw Lampa cu căciulă on the DVD we recently watched of Aferim!, Jude’s 2015 historical drama about mistreatment of Roma people in the 19thy century. You can DEFINITELY see the Rossellini influence in this short. Rossellini is a giant among post-war Italian moviemakers, but his movies only observe humanity, they aren’t as compassionately involved with humanity the way De Sica’s movies are. Still Rosselli was a gifted guy, and not a bad one to be inspired by. Here’s the short, it’s 23.5 minutes long.

With Marian Bratu as the boy, Gabriel Spahiu as the dad, Natalia Calin as the mom, and Alexandru Georgescu as the TV repairman. Cinematography by the gfted Marius Panduru; as far as I can tell, he’s shot all of Radu Jude’s films.

The reason that the Bruce Lee movie is both very close and far away is because it’s showing on Romanian TV at 6 PM. But the family’s TV is broken. So the boy and his father have to lug it quite a ways in the hopes of getting it repaired. It is mostly a muddy, drizzly slog. The image I used up top IS from the short, but it’s also something of a lie; most of the movie looks like this:

So, gloomy! But I promise you a happy ending when it all plays out. I do like you folks, you know.

That image is from this site, as is the video I downloaded. The site’s called “Rarefilmm,” and bills itself as “the cave of forgotten films.” There’s almost 500 different titles to peruse, from all over the world, and I’ll bet quite a few are pretty interesting. Something for you to explore on a rainy day sometime.

Now, per Wiki, this short won awards at Sundance, Toronto, Kraków, Rotterdam, like over a dozen other film festivals. I wish I could tell you that’s entirely because it’s a good short — is IS a good short. But that’s not why it won.

It won because the movie industry — worldwide — LOVES celebrating how its golden treasures of the past bring joy to the hearts of all the meaningless little people out there. Whether it’s that infuriating Nicole Kidman ad recently, or the annoying Cinema Paradiso from 1988, or The Artist (OK, that one was actually really good), or any of a thousand documentaries about this or that era which it calls a “golden age,” movie industry people just adore anything that tells them what they do is the most important thing on Earth.

So they weren’t giving awards to Lampa cu căciulă because it’s a well-made short about particular people of a particular place who have financial troubles (even though it is those things) — they gave it awards because the kid wants to see a Bruce Lee movie. Had it been exactly the same story, except what the kid wanted to watch was a soccer match, no way this would have won so many awards.

But, in any case, I don’t mind. It probably helped get Radu Jude’s career started and so far I’ve liked several of his movies.

So watch the short if you want to see something good and gloomy (but with a happy ending). Be sure and mosey on over to rarefilmm.com sometime and see if anything they have interests you.

Thanks as always for reading, and we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming tomorrow.

Kedi (2016). Grade: B-

Istanbul has been re-named a few times over the years; it was once Byzantium, once Constantinople. But for certain tourists and kitty admirers, it’s come to be known informally as Catstanbul. Because there’s around 150,000 stray/feral cats in the city. Per Wiki, there’s even cat vending machines; you can put coins in one and it will spray out food/treats at cat level. Where there will always be cats waiting for someone to do so. The country has an official no catch/no kill policy toward the animals.

As the writers at this site mentioned, it would be easy for the film to fall into the style of popular internet cat videos — by exclusively showing adorable or strange-looking cats doing amusing things. But it’s better than something like that, because director Ceyda Torun grew up in Istanbul and helped take care of dozens of cats. She attended college in the U.S. and worked on film/TV projects in the U.S. and England for years; Kedi was like a homecoming for her. The movie’s also a celebration of the culture and people of Istanbul.

We meet seven different cats, whom you can read brief profiles about here and here. They each have different personalities/behaviors and humans name given them names which sometimes reflect these differences; one is called Psikopat, and as you might guess it’s a little on the aggressive side.

The filmmakers talked to people who feed/tend to these cats, and we meet several of them, as varied as the cats themselves. One is a young artist. Another, a burly fisherman; another, an older gentleman who feeds a ton of cats and takes injured ones to the vet. All sorts of people are willing to give them a little food or attention; this kind of decency to strange animals seems like it would be impossible in an American city. (Too bad, ‘cause it might help some with their rat problems.)

The people talk about the history of how cats came to Istanbul and probably get it wrong; one says they came from Norway (?). (They arrived from all over, as trading ships often had cats on board to prevent vermin from eating the ships’ stores.) And they also talk about what cats mean in their lives. People mention how the cats help them get over early childhood trauma, over the societal pressures they face today. One man mentions how a cat helped find him a wallet with money in it, which he considered a sign from God. (The person who lost the wallet likely didn’t think so.) Another, more sensibly, says that cats can experience the presence of God, and his proof is? How dogs treat humans as gods. Cats know we’re not gods; we’re just the middlemen to God’s will. I've got no proof he's wrong!

On the DVD extra features, cinematographer Charlie Wuppermann (he’s one of two listed, along with Alp Korfali) talks about how actually easy it was to photograph the cats, in terms of not scaring them off; they didn’t mind the camera at all. A bigger problem was how when he was trying to film a cat doing something interesting, frequently the cat would notice and stop doing what it was doing and come investigate him. We also briefly see the device they constructed to follow cats around at street level and to do cat’s-eye-view shots wandering among sidewalks and through cafes, etc. (The camera is on the bottom end of a holder the operator wields, and that way the operator doesn’t have to be bending over or on the ground.)

Director Torun said she hoped the movie would give people a sense of Istanbul and Turkey and Muslims that maybe they hadn’t seen or imagined before. Torun also said she could probably not have made it much later than when she did, as the political atmosphere in the city was becoming more repressive. There’s little indication of political unrest in the movie, although we do see one piece of graffiti reading “ErdoGONE.” (Referring to increasingly authoritarian Turkish leader Recep Erdoğan, who’s been in power since 2014 and doesn’t plan to ever give it up. Authoritarians generally don’t, you know.)

The movie’s lack of bite makes it a little less effective than it could be; there’s not even any interviews of anyone who finds the cats an annoyance (which Torun logically says might be displaced frustration with the city’s overcrowding; it’s grown from 4 million to 20 million in her lifetime, and she doesn’t look a day over 40).

There’s a sad mention by one woman about how many of the cats succumb to cancer; there’s no mention that the feline leukemia virus is actually one cats can catch from one another. One man is shown taking a sickly hurt kitten to an animal hospital; we’re not told if it survived or not. (I’m guessing not, and that’s why the movie didn’t show how the story turned out.) I would have liked to learn more about the humans, like a guy who said he had a nervous breakdown and the cats helped him recover. (That focus on what the relationship means to both animals/humans is what made The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill so moving.)

But it’s still an entertaining movie and an impressive technical achievement. They had over 180 hours of footage, which they gave to editor Mo Stoebe to shape into a coherent film; he does a fantastic job. This clocks in at 79 minutes, and that feels just right. The music by Kira Fontana ranges from pretty good to very good at some moments.

Originally, it was hard to find distributors for the movie, as they said they didn’t know how to market it. Really? In a country that loves pets as much as we do? The movie ended up making around $3 million in the U.S., which is a large amount for an indie documentary these days.

This isn’t one to watch when you’re in the mood for a documentary that challenges power or tells a bizarre, compelling story. But it might be one to watch when you’re tired, or grimmed out by the world, and just need something refreshing that isn’t a full-on “nature in tooth and claw” documentary. Even if you’re not a “cat person,” you’ll likely enjoy this easygoing depiction of interesting critters and the interesting city/people who mostly embrace them.

And, for dog people? There was a 2020 documentary by Elizabeth Lo called Stray, about a stray dog on the streets of Istanbul. I haven’t seen it, but there’s a trailer on YouTube at this link. Lemme know what it’s like, if it’s any good.

Aferim! (2015). Grade: B-. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018). Grade: B-

There’s a building in St. Paul, the Landmark Center, which has frequent free cultural programs for anybody who’s interested. Concerts, dance exhibitions, etc. We go several times a year. My recent favorite was an afternoon celebrating the food/music of Trinidad and Tobago, the islands where the steel drum was invented. And seeing/listening to a performance of the Cuban folk song “Guantanamera” on a bunch of steel drums. (The song’s about a woman from the village of Guantánamo — yes, that one.)

Another thing in the Landmark Center is an organization celebrating the legacy of Romanian-Americans in Minnesota. You may ask yourself, “wait, is there a large population of Romanian-Americans in Minnesota?” And the answer is, no, not many. (Not many from Trinidad and Tobago either, more’s the pity.) But there’s some. And for some years now they’ve had a free Romanian film festival. We’ve seen some decent, interesting movies there, leading us to others by Cristian Mungiu. And those led us to check out several by Radu Jude.

Now, there’s a difficulty in watching movies from any country/culture that you don’t know a whole lot about, and that certainly means most countries outside the U.S., for me. It can be especially difficult with Jude, because his movies are overtly political. But in a way, you don’t need to understand the details of Romanian politics/history to get the kind of things Jude’s talking about. When, in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a Romanian military officer insists, “the Romanian army never retreats! It redeploys to strategic positions,” it’s funny because we all know that type of guy.

It hurts I Do Not Care If We God Down in History as Barbarians that I saw 2021’s Bad Luck Banging first, because in some ways, the latter movie is an improvement on the first. They have different central plots, but many of the discussions are similar. That military officer in Bad Luck Banging shows up in the final scene, a long (and very funny/enjoyable) PTA meeting which has multiple parents representing multiple points of view in Romanian society. They’re at the meeting to talk about one thing in particular, but they soon veer off (as politically/culturally heated discussions often do) onto different topics. A lot of which have to do with Romania’s attitude towards its own past. And that’s precisely what Barbarians is about.

The title references a statement made by former pro-fascist dictator Mihai Antonescu, about, essentially, his wish to rid Romania of Jews. During WWII, Romania killed more Jews than any other country not under Nazi control, and Romania was allied with Germany against the Soviet Union. During the Romanian occupation of Odessa, a bomb went off in the occupying army’s headquarters. It had been placed there by the Russian army before retreating. But Antonescu took it as an excuse to blame the Jews and extract “revenge” (gleeful sadistic murder). Romanian troops (with German help) killed 25,000 to 34,000 Jews during the Odessa massacres, and over 100,000 later in surrounding areas. Antonescu would be executed for crimes against humanity in 1946.

The story here is about a young woman, Ioana Iacob, who plans to make a film/public demonstration/performance about the Odessa massacres, and about pushback from the authorities. In Romania, just like here, the right-wing doesn’t like bringing up any bad things that happened in the past, for two reasons. One, half their supporters want to focus on the positive things about their country’s history. Two, the other half of their supporters think the bad things that happened in the past were actually pretty great.

Iacob’s main antagonist is a city official played by Alexandru Dabija (a Romanian theater actor/director in real life), and Jude cleverly gives him some very effective devil’s advocate dialogue. He’s given approval to Iacob’s project, but wants her to tone it down or alter its focus. Why not focus on the heroism shown by Romania resisting Soviet invasion, he says. Don’t show evil events from the past — it will Scar the Children. And what constitutes a massacre, anyways? Who’s committed the biggest ones? Aren’t Islamic terrorists worse than anything Antonescu did? Etc., etc… his arguments will be familiar to anybody who’s even seen Fox News, although Dabija’s character is considerably more literate and historically informed than any Tucker Carlson.

These conversations, and the debates Iacob has with her crew/actors, are always pretty interesting because they are pretty familiar and relatable. These are like a politer version of discussions/arguments we have in this country. (Iacob’s crew largely agrees with her on the politics, but they have polite disagreements about the focus; her performers, many of whom are experienced military re-enactors, have their own and sometimes appalling interpretations of history).

However, you don’t need this film to be 140 minutes long. The final public presentation they make — which sticks largely to Iacob’s original vision — is itself only 20 minutes long or so. And again, the final PTA meeting in Bad Luck Banging covers some of the same territory, is around 40 minutes long, and that feels right. At no point does this movie terribly drag, it just could have been tightened up a bit and that might have helped it find a bigger audience.

There is some brief full-frontal nudity of a man and woman here. It’s not meant to be sexy, just natural. There’s some discussion of male/female relationships, too, like when Iacob discovers she might be pregnant via her on-again, off-again lover Serban Pavlu. (He wants her to have an abortion and she’s pissed at him for assuming he has the right to have any say in her decision — again, a familiar argument to Americans.)

Most of this is about the politics, though, culminating in the public presentation; it starts at the 1h49m mark. The climax shows Jews in Odesssa disappearing into a wooden structure which is set on fire, and much of the crowd is applauding. Iacob is repulsed by their reaction, and her assistant Alex Bogdan tries to console her by saying that maybe some of them didn’t understand. And he’s not wrong; we see some people in the crowd who are cheering because they think Antonescu was a monster and they’re glad somebody has the guts to be honest about it. While others are probably just huge bigots. (You’ll find serious history buffs at Civil War re-enactments, and you’ll find some who wish the South had won.)

I’d watch Bad Luck Banging before this one, but this is still solid stuff, and the dialogue between Iacob and Dabija is an entertaining one, if at times his evasions / changing of the subject are mildly infuriating. People like him do exist, as we know. And he’s still mildly infuriating at the end, but only that; he’s not crossed the line into making you (or Iacob) hate the guy.1

Dabija is also in Jude’s Aferim!, but it’s a VERY different part in that movie. He only shows up right at the end, and he’s by no means mildly infuriating. He’s a monster. And he’s scary/intense/awful as hell. A guy who can pull off two roles this different is a heckuva actor.

It’s also a very different sort of film, although it has some of the same ideas as Barbarians; the dark elements in Romania’s past, the persecution of certain ethnic groups. In this case, not Jews — it’s persecution of Roma people. Who, in the time this is set (1835), could be kidnapped and kept as slaves. And treated as horribly as slaves generally are.

Your stars are Teodor Corban as an aging constable, Mihai Comănoiu as his son/trainee, and Toma Cuzin as an escaped Roma slave (in the picture above, Cuzin’s the guy perched uncomfortably on the horse). Cuzin has run off from captivity by the local burgomaster/feudal lord, and rumor has it he shagged the feudal lord’s wife. So Corban and Comănoiu are on a job to go find and retrieve him.

It becomes a kind of road trip movie for the first half or so, with our bounty hunters traveling throughout the countryside and meeting different odd ducks along the way. Old ladies tending flocks of sheep, Roma gold panners, the most racist priest you can possibly imagine, etc. The priest has it on good authority that the Roma are originally from Africa, and that’s why their skin is colored, as per the “curse of Ham.” (I’d heard that one about Ham before, but not that Roma people were from Africa. Needless to say, all this stuff is gibberish. I mean, he also goes on a rant about how people from his village can’t even bleed themselves for medicinal purposes anymore, because Jews hoarded all the leeches.)

Eventually, thanks to bribing some constables from another county/principality/Kingdom of Florin/whatever, Corban/Comănoiu track down Cuzin at the home of a peasant craftsman. For good measure, they swipe a Roma boy from the place, too. In a truly bizarre sequence, we see Corban/Comănoiu and their two prisoners at what looks to be a Faire Festival, with people selling various goods and sundries and geegaws, and even an old-fashioned (hand-pushed) version of a Ferris wheel. There’s happiness aplenty. Oh, and also slave trading. Corban/Comănoiu sell off the boy they just swiped and think no more of it than selling a pumpkin at a farmer’s market.

On the way back to their home village, Corban/Comănoiu strike up a rapport, of sorts, with Cuzin. He tells them about his various sexual exploits, including boinking the wife of the feudal lord he ran away from. And Corban/Comănoiu are pretty impressed/amused by this guy. He begs them to let him go, but Corban explains he’s got the ear of the feudal lord. He’ll put in a good word for Cuzin, and the feudal lord won’t kill him. Sure, he’ll whip him, but a whipping won’t kill you. (Um, they can kill you…)

Then they get to the village and we see the feudal lord for the first time. It’s Alexandru Dabija from Barbarians, and this time in a Very Stupid Important Hat:

I have no idea what that hat symbolizes, but clearly it’s a big deal.

From the way Corban described his relationship with the feudal lord, it almost sounded like they were buddies, part of the town elders or whatever. Not on your life! They’re peasants to him — everybody’s a peasant to him. They have to grovel and kiss his ring and such just to get the money he promised to pay them. And when Corban tries putting in a good word for Cuzin, the lord threatens to have his job.

And then Alexandru Dabija gets downright NASTY. Suddenly this movie goes from a shaggy road movie to a brutal depiction of what happens when the wealthy have utterly unrestrained power. It is very dark and violent (even though most of the violence is not directly shown). And you know that 90% of today’s billionaires would behave exactly the same way if the mood struck them and they could get away with it (as they so often can).

That’s the part of Bad Luck Banging which was missing from Barbarians — the criticism of what happens when capitalism runs amok. I don’t know that Jude is a socialist/Marxist, per se — he certainly is no fan of Ceaușescu’s ostensibly Communist dictatorship. But Jude hates what unregulated capitalism can do. He was very passionate about it in Bad Luck Banging. And it’s clear that unregulated capitalism, the absolute rule by the rich, is what he’s showing us here. He’s showing us the world as it was, and the world as many of our wealthiest power brokers want the future to be.

That’s what elevates this movie, is that savage ending. Before that, it was amusing, but also kinda dull. The scene where Corban/Comănoiu hang with bar lowlifes and hire a (decently treated) prostitute isn’t a winner. Some of the various characters just cussing at one another (for 1835, they cuss a TON) got a bit repetitive. But the end puts a powerful kick into what this movie was saying all along; about the stratification of society, and how the guys who think they have some power by serving it (like Corban does) ultimately have none. They’re the prison guards at Attica, to use an old metaphor Howard Zinn came up with.

The cinematography by Marius Panduru is in rather glorious black and white, even if the settings are sometimes a bit Monty Python and the Holy Grail-ish grimy. Pandauru has, to my knowledge, shot all of Radu Jude’s films, and he fits with the director well; let the subject choose the filming style. There’s no visual trickery for its own sake here.

This was written by Jude and Florin Lăzărescu, and there’s a little bit of The Last Detail in the plot; some writers have also compared it to revisionist Westerns. (Jude himself made the Western comparison.) Sure, I can see such things. But a title before the end credits mentions multiple names of (I presume) famous Romanian authors of the period and says some of the narrative and dialogue are taken from their works. Some of the elements here might be influenced by American films, but the main material is 100% Romanian.

Aferim! does in fact have a fair amount of humor in it — like in that scene with the deranged racist priest, or anyone else who’s expounding ideas so batty that laughter is a natural reaction. Perhaps 200 years from now, people will laugh at some of the things people from our time were saying. Or they’ll be furious at us for not stopping burning fossil fuels, more likely.

A little of Radu Jude goes a long way, and I’m not in a ferocious hurry to binge-watch all his other movies. But I probably will get to more of them. He’s kind of like a less out-there Jean-Luc Godard; Godard’s political ramblings could get pretty batty (probably because Godard WAS a committed Marxist fitting almost everything through that filter). Jude’s are angry, yet they always make sense to me. I wonder how his movies are taken in Romania.

Did we see any Radu Jude movies at the Landmark Center, shown by the Romanian-American society in Minnesota? We did not! They want to show things representing the best of the country, not the ugly past. (And with Jude, you’ve also got copious cussing and some nudity, and most of the attendees at these screenings are on the older side.) Still, I kinda think that a country being willing to face up to its ugly past IS a sign of the country at its best. That why the rotten ones, or the ones becoming rotten, are generally afraid to do so.

Forget Paris (1995). Grade: C

Yesterday with The Hero, I mentioned how Satyajit Ray was saddened by Uttam Kumar’s fate as an actor; that he was a very gifted actor who very rarely got to appeal in movies worth his talents. And how this is something that’s happened since movies began, and keeps happening today. It’s happened to a long list of wonderful actors.

Well, one name you could certainly throw on that list is Debra Winger.

I’ve never seen her give a bad performance, but unfortunately, those solid performances were usually in bad movies. An Officer and a Gentleman, Terms of Endearment, Legal Eagles, oh boy, were those just not very good — and they were big hits, to boot.1 I remember liking her in Shadowlands and not hating the movie, but, um… directed by Richard Attenborough? He usually was not a good director!

Billy Crystal, alas, isn’t an especially good one either. He’s not outright bad — he doesn’t try too hard to be “artsy” like some actor/directors do. But Crystal at times can show really woefully bad judgement.

His made-for-HBO movie 61* had a pretty good subject (the unlikely friendship between hard-living Mickey Mantle and clean-cut Roger Maris). It had good actors playing those two characters. But the script was really pedestrian and the musical selections were just painfully awful.

Here again, the music is not ideal. The script has its moments but also its major cop-outs. And some of the cast is pretty good — some of them are just entirely too full of themselves. I realize it’s hard as an actor to tell someone else they’re acting insufferably smug, but sometimes these things need to be done.

The framing device here is playing with fire, and it gets burned. The movie’s about the ups and downs of a multi-year romantic relationship between Crystal and Winger. Ok — that’s fine. It starts with Crystal’s best friend, Joe Mantegna, explaining to HIS date, Cynthia Stevenson, how Crystal and Winger met. Still fine; they’re waiting at a restaurant for Crystal to join them, Stevenson hasn’t met him, it makes sense to tell her a little bit about your friend. Maybe not this much? But I’ll still buy it.

Over the course of the evening, Mantegna and Stevenson are joined by other friends of Crystal’s and Winger’s, and each of them is gonna tell another part of the up/down relationship story. OK — now we’re starting to get a little preposterous. How would this many people know this many details about someone else’s relationship? I don’t ask that many questions of my friends about their relationships. I kinda know when they’re going through a rough patch, and I definitely want to know if their spouse/partner/family is having any health worries, but I’m not gonna pry into (or be that curious about) their romantic ups/downs.

Plus, with this many people narrating the story, you’re risking that at least one of them will be really annoying, and Richard Masur is that one. He’s a totally annoying twerp. He was annoying in Six Degrees of Separation, too, yet there you were annoyed with the character, not the actor. Here, you are annoyed with both. It might not be Masur’s fault, though. It might be the script’s.

This was written by Crystal with Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, and Ganz/Mandel had an awful habit of inserting treacly sentimentality into their scripts. A League of Their Own was almost sunk by it. The American Fever Pitch2 was absolutely sunk by it (and by what Jon Greenaway recently & correctly called “the banal horror of Jimmy Fallon.”)

Here, the sentiment isn’t the problem — it’s the idiotic characterization of how “men” and “women” behave. This movie is more than a little infected by Crystal having appeared in Nora Ephron’s massive hit, When Harry Met Sally, which asked the moronic question “can single men ever find a single woman attractive and just be friends with her?” Um, yes. Maybe not when they’re 22 and their frontal lobes haven’t fully developed yet, but as grownups, yes. That answers that question, and you don’t need two hours to do it.3

All these men (Crystal, Mantegna, Masur, and John Spencer) all do Guy Things together, and all their girlfriends/partners want to do Girl Things instead. The guys like to grill steaks and go bowling, the women drink wine and talk about relationships and like art museums. The idea that a guy might be into anything more cultured than a bowling alley is seen as anathema. Well, maybe to Crystal/Ganz/Mandel it is.

Plus, there’s another hangover from Nora Ephron here; what Owen Gleiberman called “a romantic comedy made up entirely of yuppie signifiers.” In Ephron’s popular movies, and in this, everybody basically lives in a world without any financial worries and is always jogging or eating at fancy restaurants (or going to expensive therapists) and they all live in New York or Los Angeles, which are NOT cheap places to live. It’s the world that Ephron and Crystal and Ganz/Mandel inhabit, so naturally they assume EVERYONE does. (In the Ganz/Mandel Fever Pitch, Drew Barrymore is a high-powered corporate executive; as if!)

The music here is the same pastiche which Ephron liked to use, that mixture of old American songbook standards; nobody likes rock or pop.4 (Just like how in Woody Allen movies anybody who likes rock or pop is shown as a moron.) It’s just another thing that makes you think these people do not resemble any humans you’ve ever met, or at least any you’ve met who you could listen to for more than a minute without desperately wanting to flee.

Because Winger is so good, there is some genuine feeling to the romantic relationship. And an almost-real dilemma; Winger has uprooted her career/life to be with Crystal, and he’s not willing to uproot his to be with her. Since most of us would utterly and completely side with the Winger character in this situation, the script gives Crystal a job presumably every male in the audience is expected to consider a dream; he’s an NBA ref.

You don’t have to ponder too much to see that Crystal/Ganz/Mandel, each of whom has a very tough-to-get gig as a well-paid scriptwriter, is comparing their own careers to the NBA career Crystal has in the movie. It’s one thing for Winger to get a different job, you see, because (in this universe) there’s a million identical yuppie positions just like it; a high-paid scriptwriter or NBA ref is a job tons of others would love to have and can’t.

This would land a little harder if Crystal was really doing a job that sounded fun, like, I dunno, being a successful performer? Or something socially valuable which he didn’t want to quit. I’m sure that directing a bunch of NBA stars making cameos was fun for Crystal, but who would want to be a ref and get yelled at all the time? You know what kind of person becomes a ref? Not the kind of sensitive soul Crystal is playing here! Guys like Bob Delaney, who before becoming a ref was an undercover cop infiltrating the mafia! (And suffers PTSD because of it.) Action and competition junkies. Why would Debra Winger fall for anybody like that?

All this said, there’s a few amusing moments. Winger really goes all-out on a bit where there’s a pigeon in her hair (it is an actual pigeon — that’s called being a trouper!). William Hickey, so slyly funny in Prizzi’s Honor, isn’t playing anyone nearly as sly this time, but he’s still a hoot. Crystal’s jokes about what a bast**d his dad was are good. Cathy Moriarty always makes me grin by how smart and down-to-Earth she is. It’s fun to see a relaxed Joe Mantegna; he’s an excellent actor who’s usually playing bad guys or deeply withdrawn ones, and him being easygoing is a nice change.

Still, what can you do with a script that has Mantegna explain to Stevenson how he knew his friend was in love because he didn’t tell him details about the first time they had sex? I have never wanted anybody ever to tell me details about their sex lives. Does Crystal? Do Ganz/Mandel? If so, they are really weird! If not, they’re writing some stereotypical Man Behavior that no man I’ve ever remotely liked would ever do!

The cinematography’s by Don Burgess, who frequently worked with Robert Zemeckis, and not on the Zemeckis movies you liked, on stuff like The Polar Express. The lousy musical score (aside from the lousy soundtrack selection) is by Marc Shaiman, whose career has always puzzled me. Every score by Marc Shaiman is at best inoffensive and at worst total dreck… except one. He co-wrote the songs for South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut! Those really excellent songs! The plot was just so-so, as South Park always was, but those songs were A++ material. How could THAT Marc Shaiman write THIS score? People can be so confusing.

Is this a movie worth seeing? I guess if you’re a Winger fan, just for her good moments, or a Crystal fan, for the first 10-15 minutes of the movie or so (when he’s at his most likable here). Don’t see it for what it has to say about Romance, that’s for sure.

It also might be fun for 1990s NBA fans. There’s 20 NBA players or broadcasters from the 1990s here, and I recognized all but one or two of them. There’s probably not 20 athletes in all of sport today I could immediately recognize in a movie… and I still follow baseball a fair amount. But I mostly follow it on the radio. You can listen to baseball games and type snotty movie reviews at the same time! It’s called multitasking, I think.

The Hero (1966). Grade: B

Uttam Kumar is the biggest superstar in all of Bengali cinema. (Which is a big deal; Bengali is the seventh-most spoken language on Earth). But along the way to stardom, he’s made a few decisions he doen’t love to think about. He’s lost a few friends. And he’s lost his illusions about being a movie star, too.

Meanwhile, his fellow train passengers vary wildly in their reactions to the movie star in their midst. Some are genuinely nonchalant; one respected elder tells Kumar he finds all sound movies inherently indecent. Some are only pretending nonchalance in an attempt to seem cool; they’re actually tickled to be on a train with a star. And some are in awe. They see Kumar as the hero of the title, because that’s what he always plays, doesn’t he? A big action or dramatic hero. It must be true about him as a person, too.

This 1966 movie is clearly a reaction to Federico Fellini’s 1963 8½, where Marcello Mastroianni plays a big, famous director (aka Fellini) suffering from artistic constipation; that movie has a ethically conflicted main character who frequently wears cool shades, and so does this one. That movie has semi-surrealistic dream sequences, and so does this one. (They’re the weakest thing in this movie.)

But Fellini was only and always interested in only one thing; the amazing genius of Fellini. Ray’s far more humane nature means the movie’s not about himself (maybe only in one way it is); it’s about these characters. It’s about how the movie star feels about being a movie star. It’s about how women feel in the roles they are expected to play for men. And it’s about the compromises that all of us make along the way. Well, not all of us. But most of us. Certainly me.

The kicker here is that the actor Uttam Kumar (he’s playing a fictional character named “Arindam Mukherjee”) was an actual real star, one of the biggest in all of India. Action movies, dramas, romances, mysteries, comedies, musicals, you name it. So this is like if Cary Grant in 1945 or Harrison Ford in 1985 had appeared in a movie about a movie star who hated themselves. Impossible to imagine for either of those guys, or maybe any American movie stars in general. Although maybe some Brits could do it. (In My Favorite Year, Peter O’Toole does something along these lines, although that movie’s primarily a comedy.)

Satyajit Ray wrote this with Kumar in mind, and likely wouldn’t have made it if Kumar had declined the part. He is excellent here. He has the air of a arrogant self-made man at the beginning, yet his face and his voice soften during the course of the movie, suggesting someone who’s worn down by life becoming repetitive. Kumar turned 40 the year this was made, and he looks it, but he FEELS older. He’d die at age 53, and traffic shut down in Kolkata when people heard the news.

After Kumar’s death in 1980, Ray wrote an appreciation speech which is included with the Criterion booklet. He said Kumar “established an image for himself with his body language and the way he delivered his dialogue. He knew the extent to which to project himself to please his audience … This is an exceptional skill that doesn’t come easy.” That’s always been the case with stars, hasn’t it? Audiences feel like they’re getting to see what the person is “really like” in their roles, and without letting some of their own personality shine through, no actor can establish that rapport with viewers. But how much to let through? Too much, and we feel like an actor is being self-indulgent.

Ray added that Kumar “had an unusual ability to dominate the screen even when he was not doing anything. The audience would wait to see what he would eventually do or say. There aren’t many actors who have this ability to hold the audience, to capture their minds even when doing apparently nothing at all.” That seems like an excellent appraisal to me.

It’s not just Kumar’s movie, far from it. We’ve got a whole assortment of interesting people on the train, like in The Lady Vanishes — except here, nobody’s murdered. There’s ad exec Kamu Mukherjee, trying to land a business client (Ranjit Sen); Mukherjee is married to a much younger beauty, Susmita Mukherjee. When he notices the business client noticing his wife, the ad exec tells her to throw some flirting the businessman’s way. She’s so appalled that she eventually throws herself at a stranger in retaliation. The ad exec and the business client are utterly oblivious to the movie star; they consider his pretending to be child’s play compared to their own.

The business guy and his wife/daughter (Bharati Devi and Lali Chowdhury) share Kumar’s compartment. Devi/Chowdhury are huge fans of Kumar’s, and see all his movies. Chowdhury’s got some kind of mild bug that’s made her temporarily bedridden; her mom thinks that meeting the movie star is making Chowdhury better. (Which you can tell Kumar finds depressing; he knows he doesn’t deserve such admiration.)

There’s Jamuna Sinha and Subrata Sensharma as shyer fans; they ask their train companion, Sharmila Tagore, to go get an autograph for them. Tagore does, and ticks Kumar off by not being a fan herself. But, she is the editor of a women’s magazine, a Bengali Vogue or whatever, and is willing to do an interview with the big movie star for her readers.

This is when the movie, and Kumar’s performance, both start getting really good. Because as Kumar opens up to Tagore, he’s not doing a puff promo piece for his latest movie; he’s remembering how he got here in the first place. Amazingly, Tagore was only 20 when she played this editor; she does look young, but her presence seems much older. The same could be said for her role as a young bride in The World of Apu — she was only 14 when that was made, which, eww! But she seemed at least 18, and her co-star was only 23, so it’s not “eww” in that movie. She turns into, essentially, Kumar’s confessor here. And she’s convincingly someone you’d spill your woes to. (Ray nicely lets the relationship develop without ever making it a romantic one.)

We meet Somen Bose, who was once Kumar’s colleague/mentor in stage drama. He pleads with Kumar to never do movies, because movies require a dumbed-down, more hammy form of acting. Kumar ignores his mentor, and is determined to prove him wrong… but in his first major film role, with established screen star Bireswar Sen, the star tells Kumar to stop mumbling. Play it broad, like me, or you’ll never get anywhere. (Kumar carries a grudge against this guy for years.)

And then there’s Kumar’s onetime friend, Premangshu Bose.1 Bose is a labor activist / strike leader, and he keeps trying to get Kumar to say something on behalf of some striking workers; Kumar is too afraid that getting involved with something so politically contentious will harm his career. This might be the only part that’s semi-autobiographical for Satyajit Ray; as Pico Iyer at Criterion points out, Ray was frequently criticized for making art-house movies about poor people instead of fun movies that might cheer poor people up. (Ray was also accused of being too apolitical, but you can definitely see where his sympathies lie; that’s more than you can say for Kurosawa, who was a great filmmaker but whose movies sometimes leaned a little politically reactionary.)

These flashback scenes give the movie its heart, and make it so much more than 8½ was. There, the Fellini stand-in was bitching about how fame and success were just so much pressure. Ho-hum. This guy is weighing the choices and decisions he’s made, the ones he’s not proud of. And he knows that if he has a few flops in a row, all his stardom can go away; he’ll have made those compromised choices for nothing. (Kumar himself was close to being considered box-office poison early on in his career, and almost quit acting right before he became a huge star.)

There’s a framing device which, for me, doesn’t quite work. A story in the papers about how Kumar recently got in a fight in a bar. That’s fine enough to introduce us to him (his fame, his stubbornness), but later it comes back in several ways. He had an affair with a married woman/acting hopeful, and the fight was with the woman’s husband. This feels a bit moralizing, and the way it’s revealed is in another one of those dream-like sequences. I actually fell asleep during one of them (and had to rewatch the parts I missed later; some good parts, too!) Real dreams are nothing like the ways dream sequences are shown in movies, and when movies try to show dreamlike states, I get immediately bored. There is a decent payoff of sorts when Kumar rejects a situation like the one which led to the earlier affair, but it’s not enough of a payoff to make the moralizing / dream imagery worthwhile.

Get through those dream sequences, though (they aren’t long), ignore the dopey moralizing, and you’ve got an affecting story of a guy who’s apparently got “it all” but actually doesn’t. For all the work that Hollywood stars put into talk show appearances and such, trying to make us see how “normal” they are, Uttam Kumar manages to convey a sense of insecurity and self-doubt/self-loathing which puts those moments on the TV sofas to shame. It’s a terrific performance.

Near the end of Satyajit Ray’s speech about Kumar, he noted that the nature of the movie business meant that, unfortunately, most of Kumar’s talent was wasted on junk. “When I think that in thirty years he acted in more than 250 films, I wonder how many of them survive, how many will stay in people’s memories. He will be judged or measured by the few films that will be remembered, and they will bear witness to his artistic talent. It is a particular tragedy in our country that the number of excellent actors and actresses far outstrips that of directors and scriptwriters … they are often frustrated by the fact that they do not get good enough roles. I can’t tell you how tragic this is.”

It is — and by no means just in Bengali cinema, either. In 100+ years of movie history, how many terrifically gifted performers have had their abilities squandered by moronic studio heads, hacky egotistical directors, writers who never imagined anything they hadn’t seen in hundreds of movies before? Quite a lot. It happened in the silent era and it’s happening today. At least Kumar got an opportunity to play a fully-imagined role in this one. It’s absolutely worth watching.

Ray does the music himself; he’s no Ravi Shankar (who scored the Apu trilogy), yet the score’s still serviceable. His frequent collaborator up through this film was cinematographer Subatra Mitra; they’d never work together again, although Mitra made few films after this, period. Their main accomplishment here was making the rear-screen projection look less awful than usual (it still doesn’t look ideal). This post about the train design mentions that Kumar was also nervous about appearing without makeup; he’d recently had the chicken pox. He looks fine.

Those who appreciate this movie can read this very solid review by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay or this one by TheFilmSufi (who has many more reviews of Ray movies listed here). One I also liked, though, was this simple short review by a commenter on TheMovieDB (a website I’m still not exactly sure who’s behind it or how it runs; I generally just use it for images). The commenter states: “While 8½ is presented as a campy inside joke for film connoisseurs, The Hero is completely lucid, unpretentious and human. Here our protagonist isn’t just sleepwalking through a dreamscape, but he reacts with the full range of emotions” … “Both films are masterpieces, but I gotta say I found The Hero a lot more relatable.”

Don’t let anybody tell you 8½ is a masterpiece!2 Is The Hero? I don’t think so, but I think it’s a fine, intelligent and entertaining film. Do yourself a favor and if you ever THINK about watching 8½, watch this instead. It is better and you will be happier. Your happiness is my goal, remember? Not really, it ain’t, but we’ll make it one of ‘em for today.

Old Joy (2006). Grade: B

I’d probably do better if I liked people more. Don’t get me wrong, I like you; you’re a reader of taste and discernment, of course, which you’ve proven by clicking on this site. But most people eventually annoy me. Especially pretentious creative people.

When Kelly Reichardt made her first, interesting-but-flawed feature, River of Grass, she acknowledged (in the DVD commentary) that she wasn’t, at that time, a good enough writer. She knew the kinds of characters and the kind of mood and setting she wanted, she just didn’t know how to shape a story around these things.

In the subsequent 12 years, Reichardt worked on short films and taught college courses,1 and met many people. One was fellow indie filmmaker Todd Haynes. Haynes introduced Reichardt to short story/novel writer Jonathan Raymond. And Raymond provided the story for Old Joy.

Now, if I had met Todd Haynes, I wouldn’t have listened to anything he had to say. I would have been like, “your movies suck!” I mean, that would be in my head. Out loud I would just say I hadn’t seen them. In my head, though, I’d think “this guy’s movies suck” and that would be the end of it.

And that’s why Kelly Reichardt is a MUCH better filmmaker than I would be.

I’ve worked on indie films, one with a budget that wasn’t much less than what Reichardt had for Old Joy. But the script was too thin. There were some decent-enough ideas, but they weren’t shaped anywhere NEAR thoughtfully enough. And that’s on me. I would have done better if I knew somebody who could write!

There’s not a complicated plot here, or complicated characters. Just two basically decent guys and a cool dog. But the feelings seem real; they seem like things people I know have gone through. That’s the kind of framing a writer can help with.

Musician Will Oldham plays an aging stoner/drifter character (he lives out of a van, and he’s in his mid-30s). Oldham has called up an old friend of his, Daniel London, offering to “hang out” for a weekend. Go camping, visit some natural hot springs. Just chill; I miss chilling with you.

London says, sure, I’d like that.

And then the onslaught of horror begins…

No, actually, I’m f***ing with ya. No onslaught of horror happens. The old friends hang out, they chill, they remember why they like each other. Then they go their separate ways, and probably won’t be able to hang out much again in the future. If at all. They might not be able to be friends anymore.

That’s it; that’s the plot. Is it enough of a plot?

I think it is. I think it’s a remarkable movie. But it’s not for everyone. It’s for people who are interested in the dynamics of real male friendships.

In Hollywood movies, male friends are always Guys who do Guy Things. It’s either rural/conservative-coded Guy Things (hunting, fishing), or it’s urban-coded Guy Things (shooting pool, going to sporting events together), etc.

Well, when I’ve had male friends, we generally haven’t done any of those things. Not that I have anything against them, some are things I enjoy. But I’d enjoy them by myself. With friends, I would rather just hang out and chat.

You can’t have that in a Hollywood movie because it breaks movie rules about how feelings are for women (usually bonding over white wine) and men are afraid to share theirs. That might be true in Hollywood, where everybody’s competing with everybody else for a limited number of jobs. But it’s not true in my life, and I suspect in the lives of most people.

There’s a little competitiveness going on in Old Joy. Yet it’s not the stupid type that movies generally show us (where guys are competing over who’s best at grilling, for instance). It’s more that you’ve got two people whose lives are drifting apart.

London’s married; he lives in a house in Portland, and his wife is pregnant with their first child. He talks about things like how much he enjoys volunteering with local kids, and it’s not a brag per se; it’s something he wants to talk about because he thinks it’s cool. No sooner does he do so than he realizes it could sound like a brag to Oldham, so he adds, you could do something like that too, if you wanted to. (And then probably realizes that line didn’t help things!)

While Oldham never out-and-out tells London he’s a sellout, but it is implied at times. Oldham’s been to the coolest hippie happenings up and down the Northwest. He’s the one who’s been to the hot springs before, because he Knows More about all the cool nature stuff than most people. He’s the kind of guy who probably went to Burning Man in the early 90s and stopped when it became “too commercial.”

It’s not specifically mentioned what these guys’s former friendship was, but the way they reminisce about a favorite music store (now closed), they were either college roomies or maybe members of the same social scene; that kind of 1990s, alternative-rock, vaguely rebellious scene (which was less overtly political and more just rejecting a lot of consumer/corporate culture). Clearly, they used to smoke a LOT of pot together. And clearly, London doesn’t anymore, and Oldham still does (he tokes up at basically every opportunity during their drive).

What’s sweet here is how London doesn’t reject Oldham because he’s poor, or because his new friends are cooler, or anything like that. It’s just that their goals and perspectives are so vastly different now. London tries listening to Oldham’s odd stoned ramblings, and he simply can’t make any sense out of them. He realizes his friend, who he still likes, is trying to reach out, and he doesn’t want to reject that outright or cause him any pain. He simply can’t understand what the guy’s talking about half the time. And he doesn’t WANT to bang as many hippy chicks as possible anymore. (From the way London’s wife icily disapproves of the reunion, you get the sense she assumes that part of him still does, that the weekend trip will be a hippie bachelor party. Which it ain’t.)

A big help is an absolutely lovely score by Yo La Tengo,2 which is used mostly during the driving scenes. (The drive's to a hot springs about two hours southeast of Portland, although my eyes think they spot some sights you’d see driving north along US-30.) The very fine cinematography’s by Peter Sillen; if you get your face really really close to the TV, you can tell at times that this is blown up from 16mm. But most of the time you won’t notice. It captures the lushness of the forest well. (No wonder the dog seems happy; this forest would be Scent Heaven for a pooch.)

It’s a blast listening to the various interviews included on the Criterion disc, especially the one with Reichardt and another with London/Oldham. Oldham had appeared in small roles a a few movies, London was more of a professional character actor. At first, their parts were switched, since Reichardt was hesitant to cast Oldham as the aging stoner since it was “too on the nose.” At first, there was no thought to making this a feature to be shown in theaters! It was just going to be a little art project done by friends. When it was shown at Sundance, it was buried “in an experimental sidebar alongside nonfiction works by visual artists,” Criterion’s Ed Halter tells us. Critics picked up on it enough for the film to get a small national release, although critics quickly moved on to the latest massively-publicized dreck, as is their wont.

More fun from the interviews? Reichardt said that her dog, Lucy (who was in Wendy and Lucy, too)3 could be a destructive fiend at times; you needed to give Lucy something to do or she’d amuse herself by chewing something to bits. Yup, I’ve known doggos like that! One of the final scenes of the movie takes place at a real hot springs, which I took one look at onscreen and thought “oh, man, bacteria city!” Oldham met a park ranger who told him this was totally true. (And Oldham made sure he didn’t have any skin nicks before getting in that water.)

Oldham adds that “one could look back at this movie, and feel like it represents something peaceful or something innocent in comparison to what feels to be an unbearable insanity that we’re living through right now.” Yes.4

I’ve never lost friends in quite the way the movie shows these two drifting apart. But I appreciate how the movie takes me back to an Oregon of a specific time, anyways. You don’t have to have lived there to appreciate it. Just know that those places existed. There were spots in the woods filled with old trashy furniture where people would go to shoot beer cans and such. Just like you can get into a movie where icehouse fishing is one of the settings even if you live in warm places where that never happens. The vivid sense of a different place is still interesting in itself.

Again, this isn’t for everybody. Not much HAPPENS. But it’s a movie with a definite feel and mood, which, although it’s a sad one, at least isn’t aggressive. It’s not a movie intending to make you feel lousy. You’ll just feel bad for how lonely Oldham is. Although at least he has the capacity for friendship. Not everybody does. (I’m not the greatest at it.)

This website has an e-book about Rechardt’s films… well, I don’t pay $30 for e-books, so that’s a no-no. It’s got a decent overview of her career, though. And, oddly, merch. A T-shirt for First Cow and a mug that might go well with this movie:

Yeah. That feels about right.

Dragonslayer (1981). Grade: C. Q: The Winged Serpent (1982). Grade: C+

For some bizarre-a** reason (the popularity of Tolkein books? Dungeons & Dragons?), the early 80s were just chock-full of fantasy movies. Until (as George R.R. Martin correctly noted), Willow more-or-less killed the genre for awhile.

Which… wasn’t a great loss. Not when you considered the movies being made. Wiki has a handy (probably incomplete) list, I’ll just mention the ones I remember seeing lots of ads for: Xanadu (some neat ELO songs, otherwise terrible), Clash of the Titans (neat Harryhausen, otherwise terrible), Excalibur (visually impressive and dumb as hell), Ator the Fighting Eagle, The Beastmaster, Krull, Legend, The NeverEnding Story, Red Sonja… I mean, these were all various degrees of dreck. You did also have Time Bandits and maybe one or two decent others in there, yet by-and-large, it was a dumb genre. And fantasy’s not necessarily a dumb genre in fiction. (Terry Pratchett was friggin’ brilliant.) But the movies were mostly awful.

And I probably saw all of them.

I think the genre was banned from our home after seeing Dragonslayer (where a priest’s prayers don’t save him),1 but I’d inevitably see them at friends’ houses. I remember The Beastmaster2 was utterly HUGE with the 10-year-old boys I knew (I don’t think girls enjoyed these as much). And who can forget Yor: The Hunter From the Future? I sure can’t!

Sorry, George R.R., but we really didn’t NEED things that were knockoffs of Conan and Star Wars at the same time.

Dragonslayer is directed by Matthew Robbins, who co-wrote the script with Hal Barwood; they’d also written Spielberg’s debut feature, The Sugarland Express. That movie had some decent acting by William Atherton and sharp, kinetic directing by Spielberg, but it had major, major believability problems; you kept saying to yourself “I don’t care if this is based on a true story or not, THIS PART couldn’t have happened.” And you were right; it didn’t.

That’s less of a problem, obviously, with fantasy films. You still need there to be plot coherence and consistency of characters, but if a fantasy world has a dragon in it, you can just accept that hey, dragons exist. And so does magic.

The magic’s pretty cool at the beginning! We meet a sorcerer, and it’s none other than the great Ralph Richardson (looking like he’s having considerably more fun than Laurence Olivier did in Clash of the Titans). Richardson is basically using magic as a way to spook the locals, but coming from Richardson, it practically seems that by moving around papers on a table without touching them he’s channeling the darkest powers of the Forbidden Realm.

Alas, Richardson snuffs it early on, and we’re left with his apprentice, Peter MacNichol. MacNichol himself is fairly likable, but he’s less good at magic, and it takes much of the fun out of the movie. All he seems able to do is hover an object in his palm and cause some rocks to tumble. Given the neat production/set design by Elliot Scott, Alan Cassie, and Ian Whittaker, you want really mysterious wizardly goings-on, and for the most part, you don’t get them.

The plot, such as it is, involves villagers who have a dragon problem. The great beast is satiated if they sacrifice virgins every year to the dragon, yet some of the villagers are sick of the arrangement. So they ask Richardson, then MacNichol, to kill it for ‘em.

Unfortunately, MacNichol’s first attempts don’t work. So now the dragon is P.O.ed. Some of the villagers want him punished for annoying the fierce creature (named Vermithrax Pejorative, although nobody says the name, and they SHOULD). Some want to try and help him kill it. MacNichol’s got the hots for Catlin Clarke (who at first fools everybody but the movie audience by dressing like a boy). The king’s daughter (Chloe Salaman) might have the hots for him. And there’s a nasty baddie who distrusted the idea of slaying the dragon all along (John Hallam, who’s a bit of a bore).

The movie is 109 minutes long, and it drags (no pun intended); it would've been much better at 89. MacNichol’s fumbling with magic is dull (and eventually doesn’t matter anyways). There’s a big deal made out of ladies who’ve cheated by avoiding the yearly Dragon Snack lottery. Couldn’t they, you know, just render themselves ineligible by getting laid? (What makes virgins taste yummier to dragons and volcano gods in the first place?)

You’re here for the dragon effects, and for the most part, they don’t disappoint. Kids watching this today would probably find the imperfect bluescreen work to be utterly damning, yet grownups can watch it and enjoy how neat the creature design is (by David Bunnett and the legendary Phil Tippett). If I was curating your evening? I’d say watch the early Richardson scenes and then skip to about the 1:14:21 mark (hey, it’s right here) to catch MacNichol fighting first the bad guy, then the dragon. But if you want to sit through the tiresome middle bits, I can’t stop you. (The movie didn’t do well at the box office; nobody was walking out from after those tiresome bits and telling their friends they were a blast.)

Amusing casting story: MacNichol was in a Minneapolis (Guthrie Theater) production of Romeo and Juliet when casting director Debby Brown saw the show; she encouraged MacNichol to move to NYC to get more work. When he did, he stopped by Brown’s office to say hi… and they were auditioning for this movie right then and there. He immediately got the part.

Another Guthrie Theater veteran is actor Michael Moriarty, who we last saw being a prick to Jack Nicholson and Otis Young at the end of The Last Detail. He’s a prick in Q: The Winged Serpent, too, except this time the part’s much bigger. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

Moriarty plays a drug addict/failed robber who just happens to stumble his way into the top of the Chrysler building in NYC. Where there just happens to be a dragon’s nest. And he wants to find a way to make money off the knowledge.

Here’s your plot, which somebody had fun typing for Wiki: “The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, a winged reptilian monster, takes up residence in the art-deco spire of the Chrysler Building, with frequent jaunts in the midday sun to devour various helpless New Yorkers on the rooftops.”

The police aren’t sure what’s been randomly severing heads recently (it’s the monster), but David Carradine has a theory; he thinks it might be connected to a serial murder case he and Richard Roundtree have been investigating. Somebody’s been ritually murdering people and flaying their skin. Maybe, just maybe, it’s connected to the mysterious severed heads, and the crazy-sounding public reports of a flying monster.

We watched this because at the end of Dragonslayer, when Vermithrax Pejorative is flying about, Mrs. twinbrewer said “it’s Quetzalcoatl!” I didn’t know what she was talking about. She said it was an early-80s movie that was widely-advertised in her neck of the woods. I’d never heard of it. The minute I looked it up, I thought “oh wow! Shaft and Kill Bill against a dragon! I gotta see this!”

Well, it is and it isn’t. Until the very end, the most Carradine and Roundtree get to do is a lot of infodumping. They do it well, they’re pros; Carradine especially has several longish walk-and-talks done in a continuous shot, and never sounds like he’s stumbling over the (very silly) dialogue. Which, by the way, he hadn’t read a line of before taking the role; he did it as a favor for writer/director Larry Cohen.3

Cohen went from blaxploitation movies in the early 70s (he’s a honky from Manhattan) into indie/low budget horror/sci-fi, starting with 1974’s It’s Alive. Cohen has certainly seen Alien and Jaws; he uses the same technique of only showing the monster in bits and flashes until the end. He deserves awesome creativity praise for making this about an Aztec legend, but the characters aren’t nearly as interesting as the concept. (The best are probably a dude who complains about watching push-ups, who I think is Bruce Carradine, and Some Guy as NYPD: Undercover Action Mime.)

Moriarty has the biggest part, and he’s doing a whole lot of what some critics (like Roger Ebert and Rex Reed) called “Method” acting; it’s definitely a performance. A good one? Eh. I’ll leave that up to you. I’ll just say that I’m sure this guy killed in David Mamet plays, yet I wouldn’t want him anywhere near Shaw. He strikes me as a low-rent version of Joe Pantoliano.4 There’s still some offbeat fascination to this odd role; it’s so bizarre to add such a weird little dingus to a Fightin’ Biggo Monsters movie. (Really though, his “failed lounge act” audition scene should have been cleverer; it’s kind of a clod’s imagining of a clod, and it grates.)

What’s best here is when we get the final monster fight. This monster isn’t anywhere near as cool-looking as the one in Dragonslayer; but it’s a lot more FUN. It’s a cutie! It kills Richard Roundtree at 1:20:10 (alas, he deserves a longer Death Scene.) And at 1:22:08 you have the Final Dragon Battle.

And here that is! Courtesy of the Internet Archive.5 New York’s finest, shootin’ a zillion bullets into the air (don’t worry, they’re in Manhattan, the bullets will only come down in POOR neighborhoods):

Yeah! You know you want to watch Kill Bill Uzi-ing a cheesy fun flying monster. (I also love the guy who just randomly has a Bud in his SWAT suit because, you never know, might need a s**t beer before shootin’ dragons.)

Later we’ll unmask the evil dude who’s been performing the sacrifices (Shelly Desai, an entertaining actor who kept right on working up to his death this February), and he mentions how “the plumed serpent will rise again.” Uh, I didn’t see no Plumage. More like “the shar-pei serpent will rise again.”

Besides that cool monster fight at the end, is there any reason to watch all of Q? Not… really. It’s not painful to do so. 1980s NYC has some neat visual historical views. The various people the monster attacks all scream good. If you show boobies you will die (heck, that rule’s been in horror movies for awhile).

And not that there’s any reason to watch anything but the beginning/end of Dragonslayer either. The most memorable thing in it is when a small group of dragons is behaving in a Very Surprising Way for a Walt Disney / Paramount co-production.

Fans of decent 1980s special effects can check out Dragonslayer if they like; fans of fun/silly monster movies can check out Q. If nothing else, you’ll be able to tell your friends you saw a movie with an Action Mime and an NYC Attack Dragon. If your friends aren’t impressed by that, you need to get cooler friends.

Recently, I put a Criterion disc into my almost-brand-new Blu Ray/DVD player. And it looked like this!

That is wrong! The Criterion circle should be a circle, not an oval! What was going on?

Well, it took me awhile to figure it out, but when there’s a will, there’s a way… or, more accurately, when there’s a former projectionist, like me, I’m not gonna rest until I get the picture as right as I can.

I used to complain in the movie theaters when the picture was wrong, but I stopped because the kids at the concession counter would have no idea what I was talking about, and it was just confusing/annoying them. But I don’t mind confusing/annoying myself.

So, what was going on with that Criterion oval?

Well, it was a disc of an old 1.33:1 movie, being displayed on a 1.77:1 screen. Now, normally, that will look like this:

But, the BRAND NEW machine had, as its default setting, to expand the image to fill any blank space! So that image would look like this:

That’s no good!

So, how to fix it. Well, I had to doink around with the machine for a bit, but I finally figured it out:

I can’t believe any BRAND NEW Blu-ray player comes with this idiotic setting as the default, but if it happens to you, poke around on your player’s settings menu and see what you can find. There’s usually a “restore default” option if you change something you didn’t want to and you don’t know how to change it back.

OK. That’s one problem, and it’s really rare, I’ve never seen it on another machine. What’s a more common one?

The more common one is that Prizzi’s Honor image up top. What is that?

That’s an older DVD that’s not formatted for HDTVs. It was originally meant to be a “letterbox” or “widescreen” format when played on an old, boxy-size TV. Some older library DVDs from the late 1990s/early 2000s will be like this.

So when you get that, what can you do?

Check the remote that came with your TV. I know, I know, you’ve been using your Roku or Bezos Prime remote, you don’t remember where the original TV remote is. Well, it’s probably in a drawer or a box someplace. Go find it, and make sure the batteries work. If they don’t, they may have corroded if the remote’s old enough. Clean the battery terminals if you have to.

Here’s the two remotes we have for our two HDTVs. Note the buttons I’ve circled:

Both of those buttons do exactly the same thing. They will expand the image size. Press them a few times, and they will cycle around to different picture size options. So, eventually, you will get an image that fills your screen (or has some black bars on the top/bottom, if it’s a very widescreen movie). It may not be perfect; but it’s better than watching a box inside a black box like the image you see on top.

Your old remote very likely has buttons like these. Play around with it and find them!

And as for the weird black crawly monster eating Jack Nicholson’s yellow suit? That’s just a flaw on the YouTube video I took the screenshot from. If THAT’s what’s wrong with your picture, I can’t help you!

Hopefully this post is of use to somebody, someday. As always, thanks for reading, and we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled programming tomorrow.

Postcards From the Edge (1990). Grade: B-

We open in Southern California, although as the camera moves over it’s clear that this is supposed to be some kind of Caribbean/Central/South American country. Meryl Streep is a foreigner in this country, and is being harassed by the local soldiery. She delivers a short speech about how freedom will always defeat tyranny, or something… and then screws up her lines. Cut!

We’re in the making of a movie. Streep takes a hug from Gene Hackman, the movie’s director, who reassures her that she didn’t screw everything up, everything’s fine, everyone loves her, she’s doing a great job.

But when Streep goes into her trailer with a stand-in, she’s still miked up. And the sound techs catch the sounds of serious drug use going on inside the trailer. (They’re giggling about it like teenagers, which is about the maturity level I would expect most Hollywood techies to have.)

So when Streep comes out of the trailer, Hackman goes over to her and says, “I don’t care what you do in your personal life. But if you f**k up my movie, I’ll kill you.” And he gives her a full dressing-down in front of everybody. He’s not cruel, he’s not intending to shame her. He’s just that pissed.

This is adapted by Carrie Fisher from her 1987 “semi-autobiographical novel”; I haven’t read it, but it sounds interesting. Apparently, the prologue is written in the form of postcards sent by the main character, an actor who’s writing from rehab to her friends and relatives.

Fisher had her own struggles with substance abuse, and in 1985 suffered an accidental overdose which is thought to be the inspiration for the book. Like the Meryl Streep character in the movie, Fisher grew up surrounded by showbiz; her parents were both famous singer/actors (Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher). She bounced in and out of various acting schools and appeared in a Broadway revival musical with her mom when she was 16. At 17, she got her first movie role, in Hal Ashby’s Shampoo; by the age of 21, Fisher was unnervingly super-famous for her role in Star Wars. She was under a lot of stress at a very young age. It’s not the stress of growing up dirt poor, but it has its own challenges.

While Fisher drew on some aspects of her own life for the book/movie, she always said that her real relationship with Debbie Reynolds was nothing like the competitive mother/daughter relationship in the fiction version. It might not have been a perfect relationship, yet it wasn’t as odd as the movie’s is. (Reynolds enjoyed the book and movie, and wanted to try out for the part, but director Mike Nichols had his heart set on Shirley MacLaine.)

So the Streep character here is/isn’t Fisher. The characters and the settings draw on Fisher’s experience as an actor (and an addict), yet the Streep character is more of a full-time actor. By this point in Fisher’s career, she would act in movies her friends were in, but for the most part she was working as a writer; both as a praised novelist and as a “script doctor,” anonymously improving terrible scripts for good money.

On to our plot. Streep is so ashamed of the dressing-down she got from Gene Hackman that she takes a whole lot of drugs, and accidentally overdoses. When she wakes up, she’s in a rehab facility, where opinionated mom MacLaine occasionally visits, dishing out support and criticism in equal measure.

To top it off, the overdose (which was reported in the tabloids) has now made it hard on Streep’s acting career; movie insurance companies don’t want to touch her. So her agent (comedian Gary Morton in a fun turn) has worked out a compromise with the insurers. If Streep lives with “a responsible party” during the shoot, they’ll back her appearing in a movie. Their idea of a “responsible party?” Streep’s mom, MacLaine. Streep moans in the agent’s office, “what am I, a TEENAGER?”

This could be the setup for one of the awful movies Fisher did script doctoring for (among them Sister Act and The Wedding Singer). Wacky hijinx where Streep takes over cookie baking for her mom’s petunia appreciation club, and MacLaine gets a makeover by Streep’s cool younger friends!

Fortunately, it’s nothing close to that. It stays focused on the theme of how trying to have a normal life in a celebrity family is kinda crazy, and the movie business itself adds to the real-not-real world Streep’s trying to find her way in. While also trying to to not eat drugs.

When this came out, Roger Ebert criticized the movie for not going heavily into the problems of substance abuse and recovery. He was right, but the fact is that there’s quite a few movies on the subject you can watch and far more books you can read; we don't need more of them. You can find them easily if you wish and if they're helpful for you.

What this movie’s about is Carrie Fisher’s sense of irony in going through such a familiar Hollywood story of fame and addiction. At one point, Streep hallucinates/dreams walking through a corridor flanked by celebrities who died from overdoses; Judy Garland, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Belushi, Lenny Bruce. It’s as if she’s scared less about dying itself, and more of dying like a cliche. When a sincere, trying-to-be helpful rehab counselor starts offering phrases like “I want you to deal with your feelings, before they deal with you,” Streep asks “do you always talk in bumper stickers?” (Which sounds mean, but it’s said to CCH Pounder, and she’s unflappable as usual.)

This is probably a better movie to watch for the first time now than it was in 1990; the trailer circulated widely, I vividly remember it, and I remember that it highlighted/spoiled several of the movie’s best jokes. (Including MacLaine’s priceless delivery of “it twirled!”) Many of the best jokes are sight gags, and those have to do with the unreality of a movie set. We’re taking a background for granted when someone opens a door through it and we realize we’d been looking at a painted wall.

The director, Mike Nichols, had been directing movies since 1966, so he knows all the trickery that goes into making a workaday set (essentially an office combined with a construction site) into a simulation of the real world. And Nichols, who started out as a satirist of everyday assumptions with his comedy partner Elaine May, also knew what it was like to have a bumpy Hollywood career; he made the huge critical/commercial success Working Girl AND a 1973 movie where George C. Scott teaches dolphins to talk but they’re kidnapped by C.I.A. assassins. (This movie really exists. It’s called The Day of the Dolphin. Here it is on Archive; I’m watching it right now. The Archive print has badly-synched sound. That’s even MORE PERFECT.)

This is quite a fun supporting cast, with Rob Reiner, Oliver Platt, and Anthony Heald as smarmy producers (each of whom has Opinions on how Streep can improve her performance), and the wonderful Simon Callow as a pompous twit of a director who thinks he’s Orson Welles when he’s a notch below Joel Schumacher.1 Annette Bening is a fun ditz (just a few months before The Grifters came out!). Mary Wickes and Conrad Bain (from Different Strokes!) play Streep’s cantankerous grandparents.

Robin Bartlett is such a sarcastic joy as Streep’s rehab friend that you wonder how she didn’t become a popular character actor; she’s got the deadpan delivery for it. (She’s a bit like if you blended Carrie Fisher and Joan Cusack.) Only Dennis Quaid falls a little short as a sleazy mimbo; he’s very funny when he’s dropping Streep off at the hospital, but when he’s putting the moves on her later, you wonder why Streep is buying any of his act at all. (I wish this part had been played by, say, Antonio Banderas.)

MacLaine and Streep are the big roles, and it’s one of the better parts MacLaine ever had (even if she seems a wee bit young to be Streep’s mom; she was only 15 years older). MacLaine is playing up the sort of over-emotive “trouper” who drag queens love to emulate (and MacLaine loves them right back for it); when she sings Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here,” she’s half Liza Minnelli and half Ethel Merman belting “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” (And she’s doing it after goading Streep to perform a song at a party, which she applauds and then follows up to top it.)

MacLaine isn’t necessarily a rotten mother, but she is an enormously overdramatic, guilt-tripping one. The minute that Streep tries to make any kind of criticism or complaint, no matter how cautious or heartfelt, MacLaine will start moaning how Streep thinks she’s a devil gorgon like a Mommie Dearest-ish Joan Crawford.

It’s a minor form of gaslighting; like if you criticized me for being rude one day, and I said “all you do is complain how much I SCREAM at you, all the time!”

In that example, I'd be dismissing your valid point by claiming you blew things out of proportion. But you didn't! I'm pretending you did to say all your valid points are overblown, that you're being unfair. When you're not! No wonder the Streep character finds this so infuriating, she'd rather be out of her mom’s airspace.

And yet MacLaine still manages to get us to feel some sympathy and even grudging admiration for this weird broad. Sure, her hardships of being an Aging Star are a prison of her own making; she could back off from the world of celebrity and showbiz at any point and focus on enjoying her comfortable life. But, since she can’t, you’ve get to give it to her for how she soldiers forward; let’s go on with the show.

Streep’s performance, and her role, are a little less well-defined. I liked Streep a lot in this, especially her way with a funny or sarcastic line. When MacLaine says “I don’t get your generation’s sense of humor” and Streep responds with “I don’t have a generation,” the line itself isn’t funny, exactly, but the attitude behind it and the delivery are. All her scenes with MacLaine are good; all her scenes with most of the cast are good (except the too-smarmy Quaid). But I don’t quite understand this person besides the way she related to others. I don’t have a sense of who she is or what she hopes for; maybe that’s the point? It’s just a little unsatisfying. Nothing major.

The ending, with Streep followiing her mom’s advice and shooting a music video as a proto-country star, doesn’t work for me.2 I believed Streep earlier when MacLaine goaded her into singing at the party; she’s got a good, nice voice, and she picks a good nice song that’s within her range. (Eddy Arnold/Cindy Walker’s “You Don’t Know Me,” which Ray Charles killed on his album Modern Sounds in Country Music.) It was charming when Streep forgot half the bridge.

Yet she doesn’t have a strong enough voice to be a country singer. She’s clearly having fun, and we’re happy for her character being happy, but as a Bonnie Raitt type? Streep doesn’t have the pipes. (Country music could be fake as hell, but classic country singers had amazing voices.) It feels like Celebrity Karaoke. It’s not a terrible ending and it doesn’t ruin the movie at all, it just falls a little flat. (After a very funny scene in a hospital.)

And I adored the scene a few minutes before, where Streep is doing some overdubs for a movie she’s finished — the movie we saw her shooting, and mucking up, at the beginning. It has a line I absolutely love from Gene Hackman; “don’t be sorry. Just fix it.” That’s one I could think of as being useful many, many, MANY times in my life.

The solid, appropriately wry score is by Carly Simon; the cinematography’s by Michael Ballhaus, the guy who gave us all the slick camera moves in GoodFellas and The Fabulous Baker Boys. There’s only one or two shots like that here, which is right. The teeny-weenie Columbia/Tri-Star DVD booklet says this was filmed on/in the Palos Verdes Peninsula (the opening), Malibu (Quaid’s house), an office across from Grauman’s Chinese Theater (Streep’s agent’s office), and “Sonia Henie’s 1940’s Holmby Hills estate,” six words which mean nothing to me; I guess I’m not showbiz enough.

Roger Ebert was right; this isn’t a movie about struggling with addiction. It’s more of a behind-the-scenes story that’s demystifying Hollywood without looking down on it. I loved MacLaine here and most of the supporting cast, and I liked Streep a lot, even if I didn’t quite get what she was shooting at. That’s alright! She’s talented enough that she’s still fun to watch even when I’m not sure what she’s doing. I’d rather watch her being up to ??? at moments than some others who’ve got a clear, dumb goal in mind.

Winchester ‘73 (1950). Grade: B-

Y’all remember the shooting contest in Robin Hood, don’t you? Either the Errol Flynn version or the Disney or the Costner or the Ridley Scott one… nah, nobody remembers that. Probably not even Russell Crowe, and he was in the thing.

Anyways, if you’ve never seen it or you’ve forgotten: the dastardly villains want to find good ol’ Robin Hood, so they stage a super-duper archery contest. Everybody who is anybody in archery is gonna show up to prove they’re the best. Even Robin Hood; even in disguise.

The contest is pretty close… until Robin Hood pulls the ultimate badass move. He doesn’t just hit the bulls-eye; he hits an arrow that’s stuck right in the middle of the bulls-eye! Slits it right down the shaft like a Master Archer (phrasing!).

So in this movie, they do exactly the same thing. But with rifles.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with stealing plot points! Especially if it’s just the introduction to your movie, and the rest of the plot’s totally different. Which it is here.

Here, there’s a shooting contest in Dodge City. And it’s not being staged to catch any bad guys. It’s just for fun, and to stimulate the local economy with tons of gambling. But James Stewart is gonna use the contest to find the bad guy.

You see, Stewart’s got some kind of grudge against bad guy Stephen McNally. He’s been on his trail for some time. It’s not 100% clear why, but we soon find out that they both learned shootin’ from the same mentor… and McNally prolly murdered the mentor. So Stewart’s gonna revenge murder McNally; he just needs to find him first. And he KNOWS McNally’s gonna show up at the shooting contest.

That’s where things get all Robin Hood. I won’t spoil how it goes down, exactly, because it’s fun. But, basically, the two of them end up finalists in the shooting contest and Stewart wins via his super-impossible accuracy.

Which is nice for him. Yet his real goal was to find McNally; now he has. He can’t kill McNally in town (the town makes you check your guns with the marshal upon entry), but once they both leave town, it’s Murderin’ Time.

But, oh noes! McNally jumps Stewart in his hotel room! They struggle, and Stewart’s buddy figures out what’s going on and starts shootin’ through the windows (this makes ZERO sense), so McNally bops Stewart on the head and makes a getaway. He’d have killed him, but there just wasn’t time.

There was time enough to grab Stewart’s trophy from the contest, though. A very special rifle. A Winchester ‘73, in fact! That’s why the title of the movie wasn’t Shiny “Best Shot” Ribbon.

You see, out of every 1000 guns or so the Winchester company makes, one’s just out-and-out perfect. This is one of ‘em. And we’re gonna follow it from person to person.

Remember, McNally had to check his guns with the marshal in Dodge City. And he left Dodge in a hurry. So he’s got a few bucks for some roadhouse bar beverages (sorry, “trailside tavern tipples”), and that’s it. No pistols, no cartridges for the Winchester. And he knows Stewart’s gonna come after him soon.

McNally and his henchmen meet up with a sharp trader; the trader can see that McNally’s in a bind. (The trader's John McIntire, and he is fun to watch.) So he offers McNally all the pistols and bullets he could want… if McNally gives him the Winchester. McNally has no other options; the deal is made.

And before too long, the trader will lose the rifle to someone else… who will lose it to someone else. Think it ends up back in Stewart’s hands by the end of the movie? I dunno! Take a guess!

Unfortunately, you WILL have to guess when it comes to “hey, who came up with that nifty framing device?” Because I can’t find out for sure; we’re in that annoying territory of “who did what on a movie” which is never worth putting more than an hour or so of effort into.

This was originally a project Fritz Lang was attached to, but (per Wiki) Universal didn’t like how Lang wanted to make it through his own production company. Universal was figuring out what to do next when the studio head, William Goetz, started chatting up James Stewart’s agent, Lew Wasserman, at a Hollywood shindig (per John Miller at TCM). Wasserman mentioned how eager Stewart was to star in a movie version of Harvey (a hit Broadway show where Stewart played an odd fellow who’s friends with an imaginary rabbit). Wasserman wanted more money for Stewart than Universal could afford, though.

So Wasserman/Goetz worked out this deal; if Stewart appeared in Harvey and Winchester ‘73 for a percentage of the profits, he wouldn’t ask for a big salary up front. This proved to be a HUGE windfall for Stewart, by the way; Harvey wasn’t a hit movie, but Winchester ‘73 was, and Stewart made 50% of the profits! That was an unheard of deal at the time; Abbott and Costello made a percentage, but nowhere near 50%. Well played, Stewart. (Who later said about it “I'm a very poor mathematician. I kept flunking algebra,” no doubt in an aw-schucks drawl.)

Stewart had appreciated an early cut of director Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway, a movie about anti-Native American prejudice (Stewart had just acted in another movie with the same theme, Broken Arrow, although it came out a little later than this one did). So Stewart suggested Mann for Winchester ‘73. (Universal probably liked Mann’s attitude; after working with Erich von Stroheim on a 1945 film, Mann said Stroheim “drove me mad. He was a genius. I'm not a genius: I'm a worker.” Studios love hearing that!)

Mann apparently didn’t like the existing script, by future blacklist target/whiskey moonshiner Robert L. Richards, from a story by wrestling promoter and (historically inaccurate) Western writer Stuart N. Lake. (We got wrasslin’, we got moonshinin’ — it’s too bad this movie didn’t also have long-haul truckers.) So Mann worked out a new script with Borden Chase (he’d written the recent hit Red River).

So who came up with the “follow-the-gun” framing device? Beats me! Criterion essayist Imogen Sara Smith suggests that it was Chase. That was sure worth a hour of my time! Hope it was worth 30 seconds of yours!

Smith also writes that the Mann/Stewart Westerns are “honest about the cost of violence — how painful, exhausting, and morally corrosive it is. The men who enjoy it are vicious beasts, and those who wield it righteously must face the gutting realization that there is no clean way to kill.” (This was the first of eight movies Mann and Stewart would make together; five were Westerns.)

Umm… I dunno. I haven’t seen The Man From Laramie in a long time; maybe that one shows violence as “exhausting” and “morally corrosive.” Here, Stewart looks kinda sad after he does the deed, because he’s a good actor. But the movie isn’t exactly challenging the audience to feel sad. As far as the viewers are concerned, the man in the white hat won. The same thing when, about 10 minutes prior, Stewart just went totally ape on one of the bad guys to find out where head baddie McNally was hiding. I mean, he’s mangling the dude’s face into the bar, he’s bending his arm back behind him, and the movie is just kinda “eh” about it.

Which — it sort of should be. These aren’t complex enough characters for their behavior to be taken seriously. (I mean, c’mon, that shooting contest…) On a different TCM page, John Miller quotes critic Jeanine Basinger about an early scene (in Dodge City, where the guys have checked their guns with the marshall):

When Stewart enters a saloon and spots the man he wants to kill... both men jump, crouch, and draw with a demoniacal frenzy, only to realize that their shaking hands are empty. This scene has a shocking effect. For the first time, the devoted viewer of the western is forced to confront a subversive fact; that his noble hero of the west, that man who rides tall in the saddle off into the sunset, may be a flipping maniac... From Winchester '73 onward, the idea of the western hero as a man besieged by personal problems — violent and even psychotic — becomes increasingly prevalent in American films.

OK. Sure. Maybe (it didn't have a “shocking effect” on me). So what? What did the darker westerns of Anthony Mann (and, a decade later, Sam Peckinpah) actually MEAN?

Not a damn thing, as far as I can tell. Merely that the Western had become a tired genre and some audiences were ready for new tweaks. The tweaks fit Stewart; he’d spent the war as a bomber pilot, and when he got back, was a little too old for the parts he used to play. In his words, “I found that I was relying on the sort of romantic comedy style I had developed before the war. I'd sort of fallen back on it. But it wasn't accepted.”

Sure the plots were a little darker than they’d been before the war. To me, though, the acceptance of darker Westerns (and dark dramas like “film noir”) just meant that movies were beginning to catch back up with where they’d been before the Hays code infantilized them in 1934. The studios weren’t as all-powerful as they had been, there was more pushback against the Code’s stupid rules and the monolithic decision-making of a handful of studio heads. Aside from that, I don’t think that any changes in movies of the era reflected any big societal attitude changes; I don’t think we’d see that until the late 60s.

Besides, some stuff in Winchester ‘73 is just like the way Westerns had always been. One of the people who gets temporary possession of the prized rifle is Rock Hudson as “Young Bull”:

(Image from this site, which helpfully points out that while the movie has no composer, it has plenty of Universal stock music clips by the likes of Hans Salter, Frank Skinner, and Julius Styne… and it’s no worse than most movies of the era which DID have a composer writing an original score. Most scores back then sounded like stock music anyways. Most still do.)

Why did Young Bull get his hands on the rifle? Because he’s a duplicitous Indian, that’s why. Anthony Mann’s and James Stewart’s recent films about being nicer to Indians aside, we’re back to showing Native Americans as sneaky, untrustworthy, and at constant war with all honkies. The recent defeat of Custer at the Little Bighorn battlefield is mentioned several times, but that’s the Sioux up north; this story takes place in Kansas and points southward. Why would THEY be at war? Because it's a Western staple, that's why.

The whole thing with guys checking in their six-shooters when they enter Dodge City is just preposterous (it suggests that people were going around having gunfights all the time, when in the real West this was not close to true). Essentially the only woman we meet is a helpless damsel in distress who, of course, has a job entertaining patrons in a saloon.

(The marshal is played quite enjoyably by Will Geer, a serious lefty activist who’d be blacklisted for it and later had a major role on The Waltons. The damsel is the enormously talented Shelley Winters, doing her best with thin material. She later observed, about the shallowness of the part: “Here you've got all these men… running around to get their hands on this god***n rifle instead of going after a beautiful blonde like me. What does that tell you about the values of that picture?”)

That’s not to say this movie isn’t fun! I enjoyed it. Most fans of Westerns, or the better James Stewart movies, will probably like it, too. It’s just that imagining this represented the dawn of A Deep New Era for Westerns (and movies, and American culture) is kinda overstating the case.

The rest of the supporting cast is alright, including Millard Mitchell as Stewart’s vendetta buddy, old-time vaudevillian Jay C. Flippen as a crusty cavalry dude (he played a lot of comically crusty dudes), and Dan Duryea as the smarmy baddie Stewart roughs up. Charles Drake is a drip as the ostensible love interest “Steve Miller,” and you’re required to name titles of terrible Steve Miller Band songs whenever he’s called by name. Anthony Curtis is in one scene; he’d afterwards go by Tony Curtis. The cinematography’s by William H. Daniels, and it’s serviceable. Daniels had been in movies a LONG time, working on films directed by Von Stroheim and ones starring Greta Garbo; he was kinda her preferred photographer.

This was good enough that I think I’ll check out some more of these Mann/Stewart Westerns, without expecting them to teach me Dark Truths about the nature of the soul or anything like that. I’ve seen one of them, and I remember liking it, although I couldn’t possibly tell you what any of it’s about. This movie might not have been as profound as the critics who praise it think it is, yet it’s a dang sight better than almost all those John Wayne Westerns (some of which had decent scripts and/or direction, all of which had a star who wasn’t much of an actor).

And as to the subheadline above, that’s a little joke for people who’ve seen the very silly 1952 Rancho Notorious, whose re-donkulous theme song keeps mentioning “hate! Murder! And… revenge!” Which is to say, this kind of plot was going around a lot at the time, and wasn’t anything special. But this movie has some decent acting in it, and that one has… Mel Ferrer. You’re better off, in just about any instance, avoiding Mel Ferrer. But Miguel Ferrer was good! That’s ‘cuz he’s not related to Mel! He’s the son of José Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney! George is his cousin! Speaking of an actor who might be good in these kinda slightly grittier Westerns James Stewart was in… maybe George would be good in Westerns like them, too. If he needs the money. (He doesn’t need the money.)

Prizzi’s Honor (1985). Grade: B_

The other day I mentioned that you need a good script and a good director to make a good Jack Nicholson movie; a character that actually challenges the guy and a director who knows how to let Nicholson have fun without being self-indulgent.

Well, the screenwriter here is Richard Condon, adapting his own book. (Janet Roach helped with structuring the script.) I’ve never read anything by Condon, but Pauline Kael called the book “a lively, painless read” where “the characters are entertainingly skewed, and the story moves along and keeps you smiling.” Sounds like good material for Nicholson, if not especially challenging.

While the director is John Huston, who acted in gome good faceoff scenes with Nicholson in Chinatown… and Huston, despite being rather physically feeble at this point, was one of the few Hollywood filmmakers whose own “bad boy” legend could live up to Jack’s. It proved to be a good working relationship.

Nicholson plays a loyal member of a Mafia family, the Prizzis. He’s not a Prizzi himself, but his dad is a counselor to the Don, Corrado Prizzi, and Nicholson is a top hitman for one of the Don’s sons, Dominic. Nicholson was practically made a member of the family from birth; we see one of his beloved Christmas presents, a set of brass knuckles.

Just like in The Godfather, we open at a wedding, where we’re meeting the various bigshots of the family. Nicholson spots lovely Kathleen Turner at the wedding, and is startled by her appearance — she’s gorgeous — and by the fact that he doesn’t know her. You don’t just happen to see mystery guests at Mafia weddings, as a rule.

He manages to dance with her a little, and she seems friendly enough, although she says “excuse me, I’ll be right back” and never comes back. Nicholson by this point is positively hooked by the mystery woman; he even calls his ex, Anjelica Huston, to ask if she knew who the mystery lady was. (Huston, naturally, is ticked at this.) Nicholson’s got henchmen, he’s got pictures of the mystery lady. He’ll find out how to get in touch with her again, somehow, so he’s pretty happy.

His only small annoyance came after the wedding, when he was picked up by the cops. A member of a rival mob family was murdered during the wedding. Nicholson’s alibi is solid as hell, so they’ll have to let him go, but they enjoy harassing the mobsters every now and then just for kicks.

When they let him go, Nicholson’s dad is there to pick him up and explain what happened. The Prizzis DID have the rival murdered. But, they hired an outsider to do it. That way, every member of the family would have an alibi. They were all at the wedding. Nicholson agrees; this makes sense.

Then Nicholson’s night takes an even better turn; he doesn’t have to find the mystery lady, she finds him! Kathleen Turner’s gotten his number, and calls him at home to apologize for leaving early. They set up a lunch date for the next day.

Nicholson hasn’t figured out why she left the wedding early yet… but you have!

In a way, this reminded me a little of The Grifters, if The Grifters lite. And not just because Anjelica Huston’s in both (and is fantastic at both parts). But in both movies, we know the motivations of the main male character (John Cusack there, Nicholson here). They may not be nice guys, but they’re straightforward enough (as far as the audience is concerned). In both, it’s the women we don’t know.

To what degree does Turner actually like Nicholson, and to what degree is she simply using him? Does it change from moment to moment? I happen to think it does, and that’s not the fault of sloppy writing or acting; I think that’s just who this character is. And while it’s VERY clear how Anjelica Huston feels about Nicholson — she’s still dreamy over him — what, exactly, she’s doing at any given moment isn’t quite certain to us, and it may not be to her, either. When Nicholson tells her he’s in love with Turner, and asks Huston what he should do, she replies “marry her” without hesitation. Is it because she wants him to be happy? Because she thinks the relationship’s doomed, and marriage will speed up its collapse? Because it will improve her position in the family? It could be a mixture of each.

These characters — including John Randolph as Nicholson’s dad, William Hickey as the ruling don, and Robert Loggia as another of the don’s sons — are all calculating, all the time, where their best interests lie, what their best move is. It can change with the latest developments, and everyone’s expected to accept it as “business,” just like they were in The Godfather. (Except that in both films, it isn’t always “business” at all — it’s often just settling personal scores.)

There’s a scene where Lee Richardson, Loggia’s brother, thinks he’s got Nicholson over a barrel (he’s long had a grudge against his best employee), and Loggia/Richardson receive a letter that informs them How Circumstances Have Changed. Which utterly humiliates Richardson, and Loggia is busting up laughing as he reads it. Sure, it might cost the family a little money, but they’re still coming out way ahead in the new arrangement, and if it’s a way to needle his brother a bit, all the better. These aren’t the loyal-but-dysfunctional Corleone brothers, yet they aren’t the backstabbing Borgias, either. They’re your uncles who got in drunken arm-wrestling matches while watching football after Thanksgiving dinner. If your uncles ran a crime family and had rivals killed.

It’s that supporting cast which makes this movie as charming as it is. Loggia was often cast as heavies, but he was always more fun in gruffly comic roles, like his one here. John Randolph and William Hickey seem to come straight from some sample passages of the book I could find; Randolph’s character is described as someone whose “sweetness and amiable good cheer about murder and corruption were legendary,” and that’s how Randolph plays it. Up until near the end, he’s optimistic about everything; if you were adrift at sea, this guy would lead a sing-along. Even if your raft was made of lashed-together bloated corpses, Randolph would find the upside.1

And William Hickey! A doddering, feeble, voiceless old codger… but that’s part of his ruse. Wiki quotes these lines about the Don, “asleep” at the wedding: “Every few moments both small, sharp eyes, as merry as ice cubes, would open, make a reading, then close again.” Hickey was only 58 when this came out, but he looks 88; that’s partially makeup, partially a naturally gaunt face, partially hard living. (Hickey taught acting for four decades at NYC’s HB Studio, and he was known to smoke in class and drink when he was annoyed by bad acting, although his students remembered him fondly.)

You ever have one of those moments where an old person grabs you by the hand, won’t let go, says something incredibly nonsensical, and freaks you the hell out? Hickey here is a guy who lives for those moments… but what he’s saying isn’t nonsensical, it’s lucidly terrifying. You can tell the actor is having a blast; they all are (except Lee Richardson, who is given less than the others to do).

Hickey laments to Anjelica Huston that she wasn’t born a boy, because of all his kids and grandkids, she’s the most like him. (These guys who think of themselves as all-powerful have their own weaknesses and constraints; Hickey just CAN’T hand the family crown to a Girl Lady, can he? Nope!) Huston gets to play a seducer, a schemer, a sufferer all in one. Years ago, she was engaged to Nicholson before running away with another man, disgracing her father (Richardson); now officially on “the outs” inside the family, she’s still got everybody’s ear. She scandalizes the bunch by showing up to the opening wedding in (gasp) a bare-shouldered dress, like a “puta”! (And I thought that word was Spanish? Whadda I know.)

On the set, Huston overheard a doofus production guy saying “Her father is the director, her boyfriend's the star, and she has no talent.” Huston later remembered thinking, “watch me.” (That’s from this very entertaining 2019 interview with Andrew Goldman.) She’d appeared in one of her father John’s films, A Walk With Love and Death, in 1969, when she was 18; reviews were brutal (and unfair), and she didn’t try seriously to get into Hollywood acting until the 1980s. This was her first big role, and you want to yell at the entire film industry for waiting this long to realize how terrific she was; but she’s rarely voiced any regrets.

Per Lorraine LoBianco at TCM, the script was immensely popular with various studios at first, until they started to get nervous about the dark undercurrents in the story. (I wouldn’t be surprised if that meant “they liked the concept of two hitmen falling in love” before they actually read the script.) Even Nicholson was a little confused by what the tone was supposed to be… until the cast was reading it together and he realized it was “a comedy,” or so John Huston called it.

It is and it isn’t. There aren’t many jokes. But it feels like a comedy because of the consistently cheery feel of the thing. When John Huston directed The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen, his mastery of tone was so complete that you’d imagine he could never go astray… and yet he did, multiple times. Some real “whaaaaat”s of movies, too. Huston casting himself as Noah in The Bible? Directing a John Milius script?? Directing Annie???

(In Steven Bach’s book Final Cut, about how the overbudget Heaven’s Gate production helped kill United Artists — where Bach was working at the time — there’s a scene where Bach sits down to meet with an unnamed, older, famous director, who’d just come off a disastrously overbudget movie of his own. Bach asks that director what to do about Michael Cimino, the out-of-control egomaniac spending money hand-over-fist on Heaven’s Gate. The older, famous director suggests having Cimino killed — and he’s only half-joking about it. I’ll eat my hat if that wasn’t Huston. Also, if my hat is a hot dog.)

So it’s surprising and joyful to se Huston regain his mastery of tone here (and in the elegiac The Dead, the last film he made before he died). Sure, what technically happens in the story is a bit on the grim side, especially at the end. But it’s not meant to leave you in a dark mood afterwards. (It won’t for any of the characters here, they’re quite skilled at moving on.)

You rather wish that Nicholson wasn’t playing the early scenes with his mouth ajar in a dumbfounded gape, but you’ll get used to it; that’s who this guy is. He’s not stupid, but he is a bit slow on the uptake, and he’s always trying to figure out what just happened.

And you might wish that Kathleen’s Turner part was written a little stronger, although it’s hard to find fault with the casting. She’s got the shoulders of a sexy Amazon, and when she & Nicholson are rolling around on the bed (no nudity, thankfully!), you can see why Nicholson’s so hooked. Turner’s such a 1950s-full-figured ideal of sexiness (no complaints here), and the characters have such a fondness for classic cars, that it was hard for me to place the setting at first; only by seeing background objects like regular dumpy 80’s vans was I able to realize that this isn’t a period piece.

The cinematography’s by Andrzej Bartkowiak, and it’s nothing special… but he does achieve a wonderful effect for the last shot of the movie, where a character’s light (and maybe their outlook) goes from normal to rose-colored. Better, if mixed a little too loudly, is the score by veteran composer Alex North (Spartacus, A Streetcar Name Desire). It’s some original music, some familiar classical quotations, blended together pretty well.

This isn’t a major movie for anybody involved (although it is one of Huston’s greatest performances, since she rarely had roles this meaty). Yet it is an entertaining one at what it’s doing; a riff on Mafia stories that’s neither romanticizing the crime “family” or attempting to say anything about the greater society at large. You could say that the two Godfather movies were about the corruption of America, but there’s nothing so pointed here; if anything, in the 1980s, the age of junk bonds and insider trading, what the Prizzi’s are up to seems almost quaintly old-fashioned by comparison.

Finally, the running time. It’s 129 minutes long; it really doesn’t feel like it. This is deliberately paced, but for a movie with a rather complex plot of who’s betraying who, you don’t either feel lost at any point or impatient for things to get moving. They’ll move when John Huston says it’s time for them to do so, and this is one of the happy times I don’t feel like arguing with him about it. Besides, if you argued with John Huston, he’d probably sock you one; he did, after all, half-jokingly suggest whacking Michael Cimino.