Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). Grade: C. The Awful Truth (1937). B

So Charles Laughton is a butler named Ruggles in this one, and he co-stars (alas) with the interminable ham comic Charlie Ruggles, who would also be in an early family-based sitcom called The Ruggles that ran from 1949-1952. Did you need to know that about the TV show? No. Did I type it anyways? Yes.

This an adaptation of a 1915 book by one Harry Leon Wilson; his other titles include The Lions of the Lord, Bunker Bean, and Merton of the Movies, so he liked alliteration as much as Odelay-era Beck. Ruggles of Red Gap had already been filmed a few times; both the silent versions with Taylor Holmes in 1918 and Edward Everett Horton in 1923 are considered lost. Holmes I know nothing about, but Horton, I recognize. He usually played somebody haughty or gay-coded or both; Trouble in Paradise, several Astaire/Rogers movies, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, tons more. He’d probably have fit fairly well in this role, although he wouldn’t have done as many different things as Charles Laughton does with it.

Yer plot is Laughton is butler to the prim, possibly broke Roland Young; Young has to deliver the news that he’s lost Laughton in a poker game. He lost him to an American; the Yank will be returning to America soon, and taking Laughton with him.

Once he gets to America, Laughton is gonna meet various characters in and around the old-timey frontier town of Red Gap, from wacky country coots to wannabe high-society types. Each of them, depending on their bent, will see Laughton as a reserved servant, drinking partner, social embarrassment, social status symbol, experienced soldier, etc. And Laughton will react in kind to each.

This is extremely thin stuff, and some of it is hard to take.1 Charlie Ruggles, the guy who won Laughton in a poker game, is simply intolerable here, doing the kind of schtick which would later infect shows like Hee-Haw; he’s using an “fun old varmint” Western voice that hurts your ears every time he opens his mouth. (Or, as Rod Serling described characters like this, a “‘hayseed who says “Shucks, friends.’”) There’s the guy who lost Laughton, who will later return, Roland Young; watching him moon over the much-younger Leila Hyams is simply ooky.

The women come off much better — maybe because they’re being allowed to act their age. Mary Boland and Leota Lorraine as competing society matrons, Maude Eburne as a tough ol’ broad called, of course, “Ma.” The wonderfully-named ZaSu Pitts plays that rare thing for Laughton, a love interest (Laughton was pretty gay). Pitts gives off a kind of quirkiness that works well with Laughton; not so far off from the quirkiness of Laughton’s real-life wife, Elsa Lanchester. (She falls for him when he gives her the same instructions about making tea that George Orwell would.)

It’s Laughton’s show, though. As the movie starts, he’s quietly intelligent; he suggests something of Stephen Fry’s Jeeves, the smart butler enabling a much dumber aristocrat. At times, Laughton is playing reserved, giddy with liquor, shy, assertive, refined, relaxed, etc. The character itself makes very little sense (neither does the notion of mansion-dwelling snobs in backwater Red Gap), but Laughton’s clearly having a ton of fun, and it’s charming. (Most of it is; Laughton’s not very good at the drunk shenanigans.) I love a bit where he thinks about jumping over a fence and then decides, no, that’s really NOT gonna work.

This post by Alistair Nunn says that this movie meant a lot to Laughton; he had just recently decided to become an American citizen. The idea behind this flawed script, that in America there are no social ranks, no “betters,” probably appealed to him. There’s a scene where some hayseeds can’t remember the words of the Gettysburg Address, so Laughton recites it from memory. It’s corny but very sweet. (Mrs. twinsbrewer said, “once again, British people know more American history than most Americans do.”)

Because this was a pretty well-known comic property in its day, Paramount put it in the hands of one of their most successful comedy directors, Leo McCarey. Although I can’t notice much directing going on here. There is one clever scene where Laughton and three others are trying to pick out a name for a new business establishment, and the four of them suggest/reject one name after another. None of the names are funny, but the timing is really sharp.

McCarey seems to have been someone who was well-regarded for shepherding talent. He was one of a few people who brought Laurel & Hardy together, he directed Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and W.C. Fields. Those were performers with very different gifts and temperaments, so being able to work with all of them deserves credit by itself. However, letting Charlie Ruggles do his “yokel” voice here means that while McCarey might have been easy to get along with, he sometimes had really terrible taste.

Not always, though; sometimes his taste worked out very well indeed. It would two years later.2

Yer plot is, Cary Grant distrusts his lovely wife, Irene Dunn — she’s been spending TOO MUCH time with her handsome, debonair, “Continental” music instructor. Meanwhile, she’s ticked that he would be so suspicious… and isn’t it always the cheater who suspects others of cheating?

One of them throws out in anger, “fine! Let’s get a divorce,” and the other shouts back, “fine! Let’s get a divorce.” So they do. And both of them go on the dating scene, and meet total ditzes. (I don’t think either of these two would have any trouble finding much better suitors, but we’ll let that fly, it doesn’t matter.) And, just to add a wrinkle… their divorce won’t be “final” until 90 days from now.

So, what do YOU think will happen? Will they needle each other and fall in love again, just in the nick of time? Or will they fall into an abusive cycle of despair and murder each other? Take a look at the funny dog from The Thin Man in the poster and guess.

(The dog’s played by “Skippy,” a Wire Fox Terrier. Skippy appeared in over 20 films, including another one with Grant, Bringing Up Baby. Pauline Kael wrote “that dog’s a great actor; he appeared to love each master in turn.” Actually Skippy wasn’t crazy about Grant, so it took a lotta takes before he would leap into Grant’s arms. And this dog’s a heckuva leaper.)

This is based on a 1922 play by Arthur Richman, where a husband divorces his wife for infidelity and she needs to clear her name before she can marry anyone else. I haven’t read it, or seen the 1925/1929 film versions. But that material sounds gunky. A prior director turned down this version saying it was “as funny as the seven-year-itch in an iron lung.”

Yet Leo McCarey wanted the challenge — he wanted to see if he could fix it. He got script contributions from Viña and Edgar Delmar (who wrote saucy novels), Mary C. McCall Jr., Dorothy Parker, Dwight Taylor… then tossed the script mostly out and wrote a loose script himself. Then tossed most of THAT out. He was gonna have the actors improvise — that’s what Laurel & Hardy had done.

This TCM post by Felicia Fester says that McCarey and the actors ended up improvising about 75% of the material; this one by Rob Nixon says a lot of it were incidents drawn from McCarey’s own marriage (not the suspicions of infidelity, though). And this one by Nixon3 provides a great description of McCarey’s methods:

Ralph Bellamy got a good taste of Leo McCarey's working style shortly after being informed he was to show up on the set the following Monday for filming. Bellamy had no script, no dialogue, or even a hint about his upcoming scene so he went to see the director, but received no help at all from the perpetually upbeat McCarey. "He just joshed and said not to worry, we'd have lots of fun but there wasn't any script," Bellamy wrote years later. The actor showed up on set for the first day of production to find Dunne at a piano. (McCarey almost always kept a piano on his sets, and he would often sit playing while he thought up a new scene or piece of business he wanted his actors to try.) Dunne was pecking away at the melody to "Home on the Range," and McCarey asked Bellamy if he could sing. "Can't get from one note to the other," the actor replied. "Great!" McCarey said and ordered the cameras to roll while Dunne played and Bellamy sang for all he was worth. When they finished the song, they heard no "Cut." Looking over, they found McCarey by the camera, doubled over with laughter. Finally he said, "Print it!" The scene ended up in the finished picture. That was the way McCarey worked, and Bellamy had to get used to it quickly.

This stuff FREAKED Cary Grant out at first; he offered to pay the studio $5000, the cost of the movie so far, if they’d let him quit. When McCarey heard this, he offered the studio $10,000 to fire Grant. Unbelievably, studio head Harry Cohn wouldn’t accept the money or the breakup.

Eventually, as Nixon writes, Grant got it; he realized that by making him so nervous about the production, McCarey was introducing a new side to Grant’s performances; the handsome, suave guy who IS nervous, who IS a bumbling klutz. (Grant had performed with an acrobatic troupe in his teens; his pratfalls have grace.) According to Ralph Bellamy (Dunne’s ditzy suitor in the movie), after about a week the whole cast was really getting into the swing of this and having a great time. The cast contributed their own ideas and McCarey his (a bit with a bowler had was something both Laurel & Hardy and the Marx Brothers had done).

I hadn’t seen Irene Dunne before; she’s a bit grating when she’s playing sophisticated, and lays it on too thick when talking drunk, but she’s a hoot when she’s pissed off or snappy, and does fun reactions / physical humor (she’s got a great drunk dance). Plus she is simply lovely. Kael once wrote that Grant was at his most appealing when he was being desired by his co-star and playing reluctant at first… then not so reluctant. There is a fabulous version of that exact dynamic at the end, here, and it makes both the actors look appealing as hell.

The rest of the cast is… OK. Most of them are instantly forgettable, like scoldy Cecil Cunningham and dorky Alexander D'Arcy as the “sophisticated continental.” (He’s like if you removed all the cool from Raul Julia.) The ditzes are better; Joyce Compton as Grant’s ditz and Bellamy as Dunne’s. Dunne and Bellamy do a dance together; Bellamy doesn’t seem like a natural hoofer, yet he worked hard to get the steps right, and lost 15 pounds in the process.

Studio head Cohn was kind of a major jerk during production. (He did this a lot; writer Ben Hecht referred to him as “White Fang.”) Cohn was so appalled by the improv and the shenanigans (like McCarey at the piano singing while he was brainstorming) that he ordered the set cleared, and it was.4 McCarey demanded an apology, and got one. Cohn was gonna hafta pay Dunne whether the movie was finished or not; and since there was basically no script, McCarey was the only one who could finish it. Cohn decided he’d write the movie off as a loss. (It was a huge hit.)

I’m still not crazy about McCarey’s “directing” here, not with the camera, at any rate. The visual setups are so flat that this is sometimes kinda tedious to look at. So when the comedy inspiration starts to wobble near the end, the movie’s less fun for about 20 minutes or so. An early scene which McCarey added later (because preview audiences during the divorce setup weren’t sure this was a comedy) is positively dreadful; it’s a guy telling Dunne about the magic wonders of marriage in between fighting with his wife. It’s so bad, it’s like Charlie Ruggles’s yokel voice in Red Gap.

But to pull off improv like this is really a feat. To do it despite studio pressure is a major feat. Maybe most of McCarey’s later career would be spent in abject hackery (pious dreck like The Bells of St. Mary’s and Going My Way, dopey anti-Communist movies); maybe he only got to this level of inspiration just this one time. So what of it. Sometimes that’s how it happens. Sometimes a guy who isn’t the brightest bulb just hits the moment that’s perfect for him; McCarey had all that experience from silent improv, and a cast which was willing to go with him and be pretty good at it. In Grant’s case, great at it.

The camera work may not be inventive but a lot of the production design still is. There’s restaurant with a ridiculous ceiling fixture where bouncing balls are meant to resemble champagne bubbles. The costumes are outrageous; when Dunne isn’t wearing furs thicker than the padding on an NFL linebacker, she’s wearing dresses with enough sparkle to signal space vessels, plus this hat:

She wears that hat IN COURT, too.

This is really dang good. Ruggles of Red Gap is pretty definitely only for Laughton super-fans (so, count me in), yet I think The Awful Truth would be fun for just about everybody. It’s The Philadelphia Story without the slop. In that movie, Katherine Hepburn has to learn “she was wrong” before Grant will take her back; here, both sides are somewhat at fault, but it’s Grant who has to do the most learning.

It's got funny improv and a message that, in a marriage, you've got to trust the person you love. I'm twinsbrewer, and I approve of this message.

Angel Face (1953). Grade: C+

I’m gonna be controversial here, really infuriating. There will be statements criticizing long-dead moviemakers and dorky critics, and the most controversial of all, which is…

…this is a good movie to pluck cilantro to.

Now, I realize not everybody likes cilantro. There’s a strong likelihood that finding cilantro ooky might be a genetically-caused thing. In which case you can switch the herb to parsley. Or anything else that you find yummy, but is a time-consuming herb to prepare. In the case of cilantro/parsley, you have to pluck the little leaves off the stems, and it’s boring. Even though there’s stuff I really like making with it.

But that’s just perfect for a movie like this! It’s interesting enough to pass your time, and also dopey enough that if you paid close attention to it, it might infuriate you. I mean, if I saw this in a theater, it would drive me crazy. While plucking cilantro leaves, it was fine.

Here’s yer plot, kind of. Robert Mitchum plays an ambulance driver, and he’s called to a big ol’ mansion in the Hollywood Hills. A lady has inhaled a ton of natural gas, maybe by accident, maybe as a suicide attempt. The lady says it was an accident. Mitchum and his partner make sure she’s OK. They meet the husband and the daughter, who’s hysterical. So Mitchum, who is an AMBULANCE DRIVER, slaps the daughter. She slaps him back. Mitchum says, “now look, the manual says a slap is supposed to stop hysterics, it doesn’t say a word about getting slapped back.”

Oh, really? Is that what “the manual” says? Was director Otto Preminger reading from “the manual?”

Because, this is Famous Hollywood Story Time. (Maybe. It’s unclear; I’ll get to that.) For the slap, Mitchum was instructed to really hit Jean Simmons. If you see the movie, you will wonder the hell why Preminger told Mitchell to actually do this. There is nothing about the shot or the scene that a fake slap wouldn’t work for.

Basically, Preminger told Mitchell to do it because studio head Howard Hughes, the dullest and most worthless heap of s**t ever to get involved with movies (until recent years) was pissed at Jean Simmons. Supposedly because Simmons was a tough negotiator on pay. That’s probably bullcrap. It’s probably because Hughes wanted to bang Simmons and she wasn’t having any part of it.1 So Hughes told Preminger to be a d**k to Simmons, and the crummy Preminger was more than happy to go along.

In any case, Preminger told Mitchum to slap Simmons, and he did, lightly. So Preminger told him to slap her harder, and harder. Mitchum got PISSED. He turned around and slapped Preminger. Again, maybe… it’s unclear.

Per some accounts, Mitchum slapped Preminger, per others, he socked him. Per this one, it was Preminger who hit Simmons, and then Mitchum hit Preminger in her defense. (In any case, Simmons said she really liked working with Mitchum on the movie.)

Alright… slap digression aside. I dunno, maybe in 1952, EMTs actually hit people. Maybe it will be a new federal mandate any day now that EMTs have to hit women. Nothing would surprise me.

Including the dopey plot after Mitchum slaps Simmons. She basically becomes his stalker, ‘cause she likes Daddy figures to hit her, or something (that’s what’s implied). And Mitchum’s like, sure, my girlfriend’s pushing 30, I don’t mind getting some 20-year-old side action. He and Simmons make out a few times. (That’s 1950s code for “they are diddling each other.”) It doesn’t end well for anybody.

This movie was written by two guys born in 1908, Oscar Millard and Frank Nugent. So, two guys definitely in middle-age. This movie feels like a middle-aged dude’s fantasy of having some beautiful college-age chick just throw herself at you again and again in a way that’s impossible to resist, while your girlfriend (read: naggy wife) gives you every reason to want to screw around.

Maybe that’s why SO many critics love it — it’s their fantasy, too. One critic wrote “In Otto Preminger’s work sexuality may be either therapeutic or destructive. Angel Face epitomizes the latter quality.... Preminger does not suggest that Frank is a hapless victim. Rather his mise-en-scène, which repeatedly frames the figures in obliquely angled medium shots”

OH MY GAWD. I feel awful just having copy/pasted that DRECK. This is what makes people esteemed critics — they take some moderately interesting, fast-made junk and jab French words like “mise-en-scène” at it.

Esteemed modern critics, that is. Critics of the time thought it was a watchable mess full of one character/plot implausibility after another.

Another thing I read from modern critics about this is that it has an “unexpected” or “shocking” ending. What a joke! Don’t these people know that the Hays code existed? I don’t expect every modern person to know that, but a critic should. Here’s how it applies to this movie:

1. A character commits a murder. The character must pay for the murder. Under the censorhip rules of the time, they’ve got to be caught by cops or die.

2. If “getting caught by cops” is a total impossibility, THEY WILL DIE. The only question is how.

So me & Mrs. twinsbrewer had the ending figured out half an hour before it happened, and guessed specifically HOW it would happen five minutes before it did.

Now, is the ending cool? It is cool! It thrashes up some expensive-looking equipment in a way that makes you go “ooh, nifty”! and want to see it again. But for deep psychological insight or dramatic effect purposes, it’s ridiculous. So’s the script overall. I wanna find out who first invented the line “as phony as a three dollar bill” and slap them as hard as Mitchum (maybe) slapped Preminger, ‘cause that line is crap and I’ve heard it like 100 times now.

OK — so why say this is a perfectly decent way to pass the time while plucking plant leaves?

For one thing, Mitchum is always cool. He was rarely in genuinely good movies, he was typecast pretty hard. But he’s got a neat, world-weary presence in this one. Mitchum had done some boxing and a LOT of really tough manual-labor jobs after leaving home at 14; he always looked a little rough around the edges. (It’s an unintentional joke here that people keep referring to Mitchum as “young man” — he was 35, but he looks 35 going on 45.) When he says he’s burnt out by low pay at his ambulance job, you believe it. (And the slapping must wear him out, too.)

For another, as dumb as this plot is, it’s not QUITE as dumb as some “noir movie” plots. A lotta noir movies have plot points involving Gal So Sexy You’ll Murder For Her. (Like The Postman Always Rings Twice, many others.) That’s just not something I can feature, unless the guy is really stupid. Now, the way Simmons ensnares Mitchum here is dumb… but, still, I could see a lot of kinda jerkish guys going for it. Mitchum isn’t agreeing to murder anybody. He’s having a new sex toy. Which makes him a jerk, yet a believable one.

Simmons here is… weird. She’s usually quite good. Pauline Kael called her “one of the most quietly compelling actresses Hollywood has ever trashed.” There’s nothing exactly wrong with Simmons’s performance here, it’s just… maybe she couldn’t wrap her head around this character because the character’s so improbable. She’s supposed to be 20, and she’s acting 15. But a super-crafty 15. One who can suddenly slip outta the house right as the paramedics leave and follow one of them to a bar, for some reason. Again, I think this is purely a middle-aged lech’s fantasy. “I couldn’t HELP myself…”

Mona Freeman as the stepmom is kinda blah. As is the role of the dad, although Herbert Marshall tries to give it some class (he’d be more fun in The Fly a few years hence). You might notice the prosecutor in a brief court sequence — Jim Backus, who played Thurston Howell stuck on an island with Gilligan. (Thankfully he’s not doing that show’s ridiculous accent.)

When you see anything by Otto Preminger, you basically know what you’re gonna get. It will look technically competent. (The cinematographer, Harry Stradling, was known for his ability to shoot fast and still keep everything crisp-looking.) It will also probably have gaping plot/logic holes, try to be “daring,” and aim to be heavy-handed, on purpose. The music here is by Dimitri Tiomkin, and just when I thought it was some neat mellow piano stuff, his name came on in the credits, and the music soared to that high plateau of “bland, but MORE SO” which was Tiomkin’s speciality.

That said, I kinda appreciated that the “daring” here was merely mildly naughty, it wasn’t trying to make some Big Social Statement, the way later Preminger movies would. As a wise gentleman I know likes to say, Hollywood loves to think it’s f***ing curing cancer or something. David Denby in The New Yorker was right when he called Preminger’s Social Statements “high-minded ballyhoo.” Then Denby goes on to say “an overbearing nature, flourished like a sword, was standard equipment among the German and Austrian directors who had come to Hollywood in the teens and twenties.” That’s an excuse for being a d**k?

I dunno… but I can’t picture Ernst Lubitsch being vicious to a young actor because a idiot pampered rich boy studio head told him “I'm going to get even with that little bitch.” Which is what Howard Hughes told Preminger, and what Preminger did to Jean Simmons here (per Paul Tatara at TCM). I wish Otto Preminger had gotten stranded on that uncharted desert isle, not Jim Backus.

Still, if you’re a Mitchum fan, and I am, this is a tolerable watch, especially if you’re picking herb leaves. I dunno that I would wanna smoke any herb leaves during this movie… although it might make the Smashing Stuff parts cooler. (They are cool.)

Forty Guns (1957). Grade: C+

Writer/director Sam Fuller’s a guy who had a wild life. Poor as heck, his father died when he was 11, and at 12 Fuller started selling newspapers on street corners. By 16, he was a crime reporter; dissatisfied with the way editors altered his copy, he started going from paper-to-paper and city-to-city as a freelancer. He sold stories/screenplays to Hollywood, too, and considered doing that full-time when the US entered WWII. Where Fuller served in the infantry, and was part of the invasion of Sicily and the landings on D-Day. As some veterans would say, he “saw some s**t” during the war.

Post-war, Fuller got jobs as a writer and director for several low-budget indie studios, then for Fox, then for an independent production company of his own. Fuller had a knack for “ripped from the headlines”-type stories that didn’t cost much to make and could usually draw audiences for the subject matter (like Shock Corridor, a drama about a writer who intentionally commits himself to a locked asylum and meets the various characters within).1

Fuller worked FAST; beginning in 1949, he directed 17 films in 15 years. In 1957, THREE Fuller movies came out, including Forty Guns. Since Fuller wrote his own scripts and by this point was acting as his own producer, that didn’t leave time for dilly-dallying. Which can result in a movie like this one, with a whole lotta plot that doesn’t make sense, and some really B-movie acting. OTOH: Barbara Stanwyck.

Yep, Stanwyck wasn’t just a skilled comic performer who basically embodied the “femme fatale” character in Double Indemnity; she could also play a no-nonsense toughie (she’d been doing that from nearly the start of her career). Here, she’s boss of the titular forty guns, someone who owns the law in this town. When her no-goodnik brother, John Ericson (a total drip), flat-out guns a guy down in the street for the heck of it, Stanwyck rides into town with her 40 guns and has him out in no time; the imromptu “trial” lasts all of 30 seconds. Nobody can bring her down.

Except, maybe, without meaning to, Griff Bonnell. Bonnell’s a former gunslinger whose name is a legend (he “never missed.”) Now he’s working for the law, apprehending louts on the lam. (Along with his two brothers, Dull and Duller.) One of those louts on the lam works for Stanwyck; she’s happy to cooperate, so long as Bonnell doesn’t interfere with her little fiefdom here.

Bonnell doesn’t intend to interfere; his trouble-seeking days are over. Yet things get in the way, as things do.

Now, most of this plot is ree-donkulous. What does Stanwyck even do for money? Collect tribute? It’s unclear. How does she pay her private army? Are they ranchers, or what? If her brother can go around killing people and getting away with it, why hasn’t anybody contacted outside authorities to come in and, you know, investigate this whole mess?

Basically, this movie is an excuse for Sam Fuller to have fun directing it, and get some things on screen that nobody else had gotten before. The opening scene has all those forty guns galloping past both sides of a stagecoach, whose horses are spooked as hell; it’s thrilling stuff, because it looks incredibly dangerous. There’s a scene where Stanwyck is dragged by a horse, and it’s her doing the stunt herself, and she was 50 when this was made! There’s a lot more camera movement than you’re used to seeing in low-budget movies, and a stuntman who does a shocking full-gainer fall from a window.

Those cool visuals have to sustain you, because the plot won’t; at 80 minutes, this still feels long. Basically, whenever Stanwyck isn’t on the screen or you aren’t seeing any neat camera moves, you might start checking the clock. The supporting cast includes Dean Jagger (no relation to Mick), who was never much fun in more than tiny parts, and this ain’t a tiny part. Griff Bonnell’s brothers are played by a couple of snoozers, including Gene Barry from War of the Worlds, and while Bonnell himself has a certain presence, his is supposed to include being a romantic lead, which… uh-uh. (Yes, this movie with tough, independent Stanwyck also has to make her have a Love Plot.) Eve Brent is part of a younger Love Plot, and it amuses me to discover that she was in an episode of Dragnet called “The LSD Story.”

Joseph Biroc does the cinematography, which is notable for its technical skill. The score is by Harry Sukman, who does as his name implies. There’s not one but TWO Western Songs composed for this movie, parts of which are actually performed onscreen by Jidge Carroll. (Which is unusual.) One of them, “High Riding Woman,” contains the line Fuller wanted as the title of this movie: “woman with a whip.” (Not to be confused with the 1964 movie Kitten With a Whip.)

One thing Fuller wanted was a different ending. His original ending had Bonnell being willing to sacrifice Stanwyck to get the baddie, and Daryl F. Zanuck of Fox liked it. But Zanuck’s marketing people said they couldn’t sell a movie with such a bummer finish, so out it went. That’s what Fuller wrote in his autobiography; there’s an excerpt in the Criterion booklet. He writes, “for Chrissakes, my gumman had to think about box-office receipts before he pulled the trigger!”

There’s more good stuff in that excerpt; Fuller’s a good memoir writer. He says that the movie had two inspirations; one was the supposed wave of “youth delinquency” going around (at least in Hollywood, it was, with movies like Blackboard Jungle). But another biggie for him was the nation’s fetishization of guns. “Hell if I know why people think guns are sexy. I cooked up a helluva lot of sexual metaphors playing with the idea” … “‘Wes looks at his future bride down the barrel of a rifle. A woman is “built like a 40-40.” Jessica describes a man as “everything with two feet and a gun’” … “‘Facing Griff across the dining table, Jessica asks him if she can feel his gun. He replies, “Uh-uh, it might go off in your face.” Hell, the movie’s stuffed with phalluses!’”

(That dining table he mentions is something else, by the way. It looks like something Henry VIII would own.)

Fuller continues: “Guns in movies are fantasy objects. In real life, there are just too many of them and too many people have access to them. The argument that our Constitution gives everyone the right to carry guns is stupid. It was written in 1787, when we were afraid the British might return and we’d have to fight again for our independence.2 The situation is crazy today” … “We must teach our children tolerance and forgiveness, not how to resort to guns. If films like Forty Guns serve any greater purpose at all — and who the hell can say if they do! — it’s to show how inhumane and fruitless violence is.”

Fuller kinda sounds to me like the anti-Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah loved the idea of violence solving problems, and could sometimes be a real jerk. Fuller seems to have treated actors with respect. He describes how when he was casting this, Marilyn Monroe came to visit him, and he kindly explained why she was wrong for the Stanwyck part. (“My forty guns were forty pr***s. My powerful heroine had her way in the sack with all forty, then cast them aside for the forty-first. Monroe’s wholesomeness wouldn’t have been believable, her innocence out of place.”)3

When Fuller suggested to Stanwyck that she do the horse-dragging scene herself, she was all for it; and did it three times! (It takes place during an improbable wind storm, and Fuller was using a wind machine + bags of “fuller’s earth,” a type of clay dust. I’m sure that DID make getting a good take difficult.)

Now, is this movie up to the level of Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country? No. That movie had a decent script and this is slapdash; that movie had four interesting characters and this has two. (Who are really more archetypes than characters, anyways.) But the level of respect I get from Fuller towards his actors, and the way his movies generally came in under budget (Peckinpah’s didn’t), means it’s possible for a director to get something pretty original-looking on the screen without being a megalomaniac.

I’m not in a hurry to see more Sam Fuller Westerns; there’s other movies of his I’m curious about more. But I was glad I saw this one, even if the script is pretty gunked up with clay dust. It does do some things I hadn’t seen before, and Stanwyck’s pretty terrific right until the lousy finish.

Incidentally, for fans of the director, there’s a Criterion feature you might wanna see on this disc. It’s an 80-minute documentary about Fuller, directed by his daughter Samantha, and featuring actors reading Fuller’s letters/memoirs.4 Two of whom, Robert Carradine and Mark Hamill, had worked with Fuller on The Big Red One. Some of the actors kinda overdramatize the readings a lot, but the wartime stories are still very compelling. Fuller was never a subtle guy, yet he was a smart one with a conscience. That counts.

The Lady Eve (1941). Grade: B

Writer Preston Sturges was upset with how other directors were mangling his scripts, like the utterly hacky Mitchell Leisen did with Remember the Night, based on a personal story; Surges had fallen for his wife (one of four) on a long road trip together. (And Fred MacMurray / Barbara Stanwyck do so in that movie; the chemistry is there, but the cornpone direction doesn’t help any).

So Sturges went to Paramount and made one of the most famous offers in movie history; he said they could have his next script, The Great McGinty, for $10, if they let Sturges direct it.

They did, and that began a wonderful string of successes for Sturges, including Sullivan’s Travels, Christmas in July, The Palm Beach Story, and Unfaithfully Yours. Not everything he did worked equally well for all viewers; some don’t care for Sturges’s reliance on pratfalls, and I don’t care for the presence of human irritant Eddie Bracken in two of Sturges’s funniest scripts. When Surges had a few flops, the studios were quick to turn on him, they way they wouldn’t have turned on a hack who never fought for anything, never tried to buck the system.

But when Sturges was on, he was wonderful. And The Lady Eve is one of my favorites.

Yer plot here is a doozy and a bit confusy. Rich Henry Fonda, the son of a beer baron, never picked up the family’s love for brewing. Instead, he chose to be a scientist, particularly an ophiologist, a snake expert. The movie starts with him finishing up a field study in the Amazon (actually Lake Baldwin, just north of Los Angeles).

Fonda takes a luxury liner back to the States, where he’s spotted — targeted — by beautiful con artist Stanwyck and her partner/“father” (Charles Coburn). In one of the movie’s funniest scenes, we watch Stanwick watching Fonda in the dining room, getting eyed by every lovely on the boat. They all know he’s rich & single, and Stanwyck’s giving voice-over commentary from afar as she watches their attempts to win his attention fail. Stanwick’s method is much easier — just trip Fonda and have him “break” her shoe, so she can demand he help her fix it. As no gentleman could refuse.

Immediately, Fonda falls for her, since she’s practically all over him. The whole point of softening Fonda up is so Charles Coburn, a card sharp, can hustle Fonda at poker. But there’s a complication — Stanwyck’s falling for Fonda herself. There’s a great card game scene where Coburn is trying to cheat Fonda, Stanwyck knows it, and she’s trying to stop him.

Eventually, Stanwyck tells Coburn that she loves Fonda, and wants to go straight & marry him. Coburn happily congratulates her, and it’s looking like a storybook romance. Yet Fonda’s buddy/bodyguard, William Demarest, finds out that Stanwyck and Coburn are notorious swindlers. And when he tells Fonda, he believes Stanwyck was swindling him, despite her desperate entreaties that she was for real this time. She’s broken his heart, so he breaks hers.

Which is when Stanwyck plots her revenge. Sound like I’ve given you the whole plot? Ha! That’s just the first half. We haven’t met Eugene Pallette as Fonda’s dad yet, or Eric Blore as “Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith” (who is a total conman phony, of course). The contemporary critic James Agee wrote that Sturges’s characters are “uncontrollably, almost proudly corrupt,” and while he meant it as a criticism (Agree, a great writer, was also a heavy moralist), it’s what I love about Sturges’s best movies; when they’re not sentimental, when the characters are playing all the angles.

Sentiment will always creep in, though — this is 1940s Hollywood — and that makes the second half of this less fun than the first, for me. (There’s a lot of hurt feelings). Still, there’s more than enough fun to pull you through, like Pallette’s gravelly, froggy voice, and Demarest being a cranky wiseguy. (It’s the same role he always plays in these, and he’s always fun at it.) There’s a lot of pratfalls, too, and I’m not a huge fan, yet Fonda’s better at them than Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours (and Demarest is best of all at them.) And Stanwyck somewhat-attempting to do an English accent with about the same consistency Kevin Costner would have later (which here is fun).

Production details? There’s a lot. This was loosely based on a short story by Monckton Hoffe. Geoffrey O’Brien’s Criterion essay describes the story thus: “about twin sisters, one of whom dies in infancy, born to a wayward British aristocrat and the alcoholic horse dealer she runs away with, and a subsequent conspiracy to ensnare a wealthy Englishman by having the surviving sister impersonate her dead sibling.” Woof! Yes, a version of that appears here, but in the form of a fib.

This plot was partially inspired by the Adam & Eve story (which inspired the animated snake in the opening credits). Another source of inspiration was Sturges’s mother, who had a habit of marrying rich husbands. (Per this fine New Yorker profile by Anthony Lane,1 Sturges was born Edmund Preston Biden; his mom’s marriage to a Mr. Sturges came later.)

Paramount originally thought Sturges’ script was too confusing, especially the first (best part), then relented. They also wanted Brian Aherne for the Fonda part and someone like Madeleine Carroll or Paulette Goddard for the Stanwyck one; you may be asking, “who?” (Performers under contract to the studio — Paramount had to pay extra to hire Fonda/Stanwyck.) Stanwyck herself was committed to another movie, Reaching For the Sun, which was in her typical “tough talking gal” or “suffering gal” mold; but she got an eye infection and had to drop out. Sturges visited her in the hospital and promised he’d have a script for her.

Surges liked having fun people around on set; he welcomed friends and family members, news reporters, etc. (Henry Fonda brought his daughter Jane on set for her fourth birthday party.) The resultant “carnival” atmosphere made it hard to stand out, so Sturges wore outfits like “a colorful beret or a felt cap with a feather protruding, a white cashmere scarf blowing gaily round his neck and a print shirt in loud hues.” It was so the crew could recognize him; it got him named the worst-dressed man in Hollywood.

Those with sharp ears will catch the orchestral versions of “Lover” and “Isn’t it Romantic” from Paramount’s previous Love Me Tonight in the background; studios did this a lot. You might have a song in an MGM musical show up in the backgorund in other MGM movies, etc. And some fictional names from this movie would pop up elsewhere; writer Mary Orr would combine Barbara Stanwyck’s multiple names into “Eve Harrington” for the turgid All About Eve.

Most interesting to me was how well everyone got along. Stanwyck biographer Axel Madsen wrote, “The set was so ebullient that instead of going to their trailers between setups, the players relaxed in canvas chairs with their sparkling director, listening to his fascinating stories or going over their lines with him.”

Which is odd — because, you’ve got a cast that REALLY wouldn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, at least later on. Fonda was already a well-known liberal; he’d witnessed a lynching when he was 14 and always hated prejudice. Whereas Charles Coburn would join the White Citizens’ Council, which was what it sounds like, and Eugene Pallette in a 1944 movie supposedly refused to sit next to Black actors on the set and used the nastiest language about it. (Pallette may have been a little touched in the head; post-war, he built an Nuke Apocalypse fortress in northeast Oregon, which he quickly sold when the Nuke Apocalypse didn’t appear as scheduled.)

While Stanwyck became a staunch anti-Commie after the war, enthusiastic about the House Un-American Activities Committee. Despite growing up poor (and working in her teens as a dance instructor at a speakeasy for gays/lesbians owned by the open-minded Texas Guinan), Stanwyck hated FDR, loved Ayn Rand, and thought if she could grow up poor and get rich, anybody could. OK, then.2 Still, Stanwyck was known for being a really friendly person on set with crew members, often remembering the names of their families. The kind of personality who’s easy to get along with just so long as you keep the conversation light.

Because, weird-a** politics aside, Stanwyck was sure easy to like on screen. Both in her “tough gal” roles of the 30s (Baby Face is a highlight) and her maturer roles in the 40s and 50s. She had chemistry with Fonda here and with Fred MacMurray both as a funny love interest and as a “femme fatale” in Double Indemnity. I think she could have had chemistry with William S. Burroughs if she’d been paired with him.

While Fonda, if not first and foremost a comic performer, doesn’t need to be funny here — he needs to play a good straight man to the outsize personalities around him in Demarest, Coburn, Pallette and Stanwyck. He succeeds wonderfully. (He was always an excellent ensemble actor.) I love a bit where he's “nobly” forgiving Stanwyck — until he ain't.

The cinematography by Victor Milner is simply competent, but he brings out the elegant shadings in all Stanwyk’s fancy Edith Head gowns. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as crisp as it would have in 1941 — Criterion restoration expert Lee Kline explains some of the difficulties with getting a good quality print today.

Every film history buff needs to see at least one Preston Sturges movie, and this + The Palm Beach Story are the best of ‘em. (That one also has an unfortunate “dumb Black train worker” scene because, well, this was the 1940s.) You need to enjoy for the first time the speed of some of the dialogue (which Sturges wouldn’t type3 — he’d dictate it and play all the parts himself), and the loopiness of lines like “I wanna ask you a hypothermical question.” (Delivered by Demarest, of course.)

There’d been writer/directors during the silent era, but Hollywood didn’t trust directors to come up with dialogue once sound entered the scene (and hadn’t liked the independence of folks like Chaplin/Keaton in the first place). Preston Sturges was the first to show it could be done, and more would soon follow — John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon came out the same year this did, and Billy Wilder’s first directing job came the next year. Sturges’s career wouldn’t be as successful as long as theirs, but that’s part of what makes these movies a treasure; they were only possible at a certain place and certain time.

I’ve always liked the story of how Sturges got started writing in the first place; when he was 30, most of his recent work had been managing a NYC department store. He was dating a theater actress when she told him she actually thought he was dull; she was using their dates as material for a play she was writing, she was treating him as a guinea pig. Ticked, Sturges wrote a play called The Guinea Pig, and it opened on Broadway in 1929, doing pretty well. Later, the actress admitted she’d been lying about writing a play on her own… but she enjoyed The Guinea Pig a lot.

The Ice Storm (1999). Grade: B-

This is an odd one. It’s got a great cast and a reasonably-interesting story full of conflicted emotions. It’s also the most glumly moralizing movie since Forrest Gump (which was only three years prior). In that movie, you’ll remember, the lesson learned was how if you participate in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, you will Get AIDS and Die. In this, it’s how if you do any sex outside marriage, your children will have Teen Sex and Die.

(It’s kind of a spoiler alert, but at the end, there’s several teens engaging in risky behavior, so I’m not spoiling which one snuffs it.)

“Don’t do sex outside marriage OR ELSE” is a strange moral to be coming from an Ang Lee movie. In 1993’s The Wedding Banquet, audiences were invited to laugh at a family who couldn’t accept that their grownup son was gay (even when it was blindingly obvious). And that family eventually does accept it. Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would be about the power of forbidden love to overwhelm people, and what a tragedy it is if they’re punished for it. So was Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (a movie which infuriated Mrs. twinsbrewer because the cowboys were so bad at hiding their affair; cowboys are frequently, secretly fond of each other, and most are better at practicing discretion).

So I dunno what attracted Lee to this oddly moralizing story. Maybe he just liked the book. I vaguely remember reading it (a 1994 novel by Rick Moody). Although maybe I didn’t; maybe I’m thinking of other, similar books of the period. Like Darcey Steinke’s 1999 Jesus Saves. The Clinton era seemed to bring it out in people. Since Mr. Bill himself was a supposed inheritor of 1960s rebellion, yet governed basically from a Republican wish list. A whole selection of the nation’s intelligentsia were throwing up their hands and saying “yep, everything the left stood for in the 60s and 1970s was a terrible mistake.” Well, I don’t think so — I think there was more good than bad. I don’t believe Ang Lee thinks so, either.

Not that I would say, “hey, 70s wife-swapping was great!” When Kevin Kline is sitting with a bunch of horny, bad-hair bozos at a “key party” late in this movie, I cringed — that would be SO terribly uncomfortable. That’s definitely not my scene. Still, I don’t think it’s something to get worked up about the way this movie does — I preferred Paul Mazurksy’s laughing at swingers in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (which has a much better title than this does, too).

Here’s yer plot. Kevin Kline is in a disintegrating marriage; he’s having an affair with Sigourney Weaver, and he’s barely bothering to conceal it from his wife, Joan Allen. Meanwhile, both Kline’s kids and Weaver’s kids are curious about sex, and the parents are singularly bad at talking to the kids about it. (When Kline starts talking to Tobey Maguire about masturbation, Maguire gives him a look of utter bewilderment; he’s talking to him like he’s 11. Kline eventually ends by saying" “can we forget this conversation ever happened?”)

Look, I don’t have any kids, and if I did I would DREAD the idea of having “the talk.” That’s what a good sex education course should be for — answering kids’ questions without shame or fear, and teaching them the importance of consent. There’s probably good books for this purpose as well, although the dingbats want them all banned. Yet I still wouldn’t do it the lousy way Kline and Weaver do here. (For the record, my dad was a super-conservative religious fundamentalist, and every single thing he told me about sex and about women was 100% wrong; Kline and Weaver here are better than he was at it.)

Again, this is something a less moralizing movie could have had some fun with. How since the parents had pretty confused/confusing sex lives, it definitely would be uncomfortable to have “the talk” with their kids. In this story, though, the uncomfortable bits are all foreshadowing; practically everything is foreshadowing. Because the parents are immoral, their kids will be RUINED. Damn you, 1970s! (This is a movie about 1970s swingers that doesn’t even have any fun 70s sexy music like Isaac Hayes or Hot Chocolate.)

Maybe I haven’t read the novel — in any case, I don’t remember it. This promotional website says it’s “scathingly funny.” Producer James Schamus praises the book’s “cinematic qualities.”

Ah yes, those. Basically, the symbolism of the ice storm. Which, let me complain, is not staged very well. Visually it is, Frederick Elmes was a helluva cinematographer. But the people are reacting very unrealistically. It’d be one thing if this was a freak ice storm hitting Los Angeles, where it’s very rarely cold. This is set in the suburbs of NYC; it gets cold there, it gets icy there. I don’t know a single person here in Minnesota who would drive around with their car windows all iced over the way characters do in this movie (with only the defrost on to unfreeze the windshield). You need to see out the side windows, too! That’s why you have a scraper in your car! I don’t know a single person who would plan to go to a party when the forecast is for an ice storm, I don’t care how much sex at the party you’d get. And they know the ice storm’s coming, too! They warn their kid to be careful in it when he’s taking the train that evening.

In any case, Katherine Webb’s essay for Bright Wall Dark Room (which does tell you who dies) says the movie’s less about condemning the parents for their “immorality” than it is about the tragedy of their dysfunction; how Kline, for example, is genuinely loving towards his kids, yet doesn’t really know how to express it effectively. In an introduction to the printed screenplay, Ang Lee said that the ice is a metaphor for how repressed emotions, like water, will get everywhere and have the strength to push anything away (the same way water expands as it freezes). That DOES seem more like the meaning of other Lee movies. He had intended for this to be his first English-language film, but then was invited to direct Sense and Sensibility, and couldn’t pass it up.

As usual with a Lee movie, you’ve got a helluva cast in top form. Joan Allen and Kline are both solid in their increasingly-frosty marriage, and Sigourney Weaver’s just a force. Hers is about the only character who’s perfectly comfortable with who she is and what she wants. When a post-coitus Kline (whose back is hairy enough to give Robin Williams a run for his money) starts droning on about his problems at work, she tells him calmly, “you’re boring me.” And that she doesn’t want his to treat her like a husband; she’s already got one.

The youngsters are quite good too (even if Tobey Maguire’s a little too old to be 16, the age he is in the movie; when he says that, I was thrown for a bit, since I figured he was in college). Hey, we even see Maguire AND Elijah Wood in the same movie, in case you ever wondered if they were actually the same person. The youngest of the bunch, Adam Hann-Byrd, has one of the toughest roles, and pulls it off well. And you might laugh when Christina Ricci says that Thanksgiving is all about what we did to the Indians — since she had a very similar scene in 1993’s Addams Family Values.1 (Where she was playing a character maturer than her physical age; here, she’s a little more immature.) One of my favorites, David Krumholtz, has a small part -- guess what, he was in Addams Family Values, too! (Maybe I'll rewatch that one for Thanksgiving.)

Even if you take this movie’s plot as less moralizing and more about dysfunction, the tragedy at the end does feel melodramatic to me. That’s something Lee is a little prone to. I wouldn’t say Lee is anywhere near as manipulative as some other directors who like melodrama; he’s more intelligent then they are. Yet compare the tragedies here and in Brokeback to the ones in great Stephen Frears movies like Dangerous Liasons and The Grifters; movies where the tragedy comes right out of the characters and feels 100% believable/inevitable.

Again, I think Paul Majurksy’s funny Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice does a better job looking at how changing mores left a lot of people feeling adrift; so does Hal Ashby’s Shampoo. Yet this is still worth considering along with those two; they’re three ways of looking at some of the same issues, and it never helps to have several different ways of approaching a subject.

Finally, I can’t believe I almost forgot to mention this — the great Allison Janney shows up for one scene (and she was in another project about changing mores, Masters of Sex, which was a good show until it kinda collapsed into melodrama). Janney plays the hostess of the “key party,” a scene which Lee handles very well (we’re not gonna hafta watch any uncomfortable sex scenes). I didn’t like it when the men all laughed at one of the women being a bit hefty — for all they know, she’s dynamite in the sack.

Mostly what I was thinking in this scene was how much more appealing the women than the men are. They’re all quite ooky, except for Kline (and he’s way too drunk). I would have accepted it if Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Allison Janney all left the party together. At which point I would have cursed my luck and made a sneakily gracious escape.

Grand Hotel (1932). Grade: C. Dinner at Eight (1933). Grade: C-

Danny Reid’s Pre-Code.com site is usually pretty appreciative of movies from that era (the brief period of flourishing before two of the country’s biggest a**hole dullards laid down idiotic rules that every movie had to obey for decades). So it surprised me when his lead for Dinner at Eight went “I think I was too hard on Grand Hotel.”

Ah, this was the sentence I needed. Because I’ve now watched Grand Hotel like 2.2222 times — once straight through, several more times in the background trying to think of anything to write about a very famous & influential movie. And I couldn’t come up with much. “At least it’s better than Dinner at Eight” works for me.

Or, “in Grand Hotel John Barrymore is less annoying than usual, and in Dinner at Eight Lionel Barrymore is less annoying than usual.” Or, “Jesus H. Creepers, was Wallace Beery the most insufferable pile o’ crud this side of Mickey Rooney.”

And no, you can’t be too hard on these movies, everyone involved with them is now beyond this earthly realm. You can’t be too hard on ANY movies, 99.9% of them are made strictly for greed and/or ego. There’s always a possibility that people will feel sad if you insult one of their favorites, but honestly, I wouldn’t feel that way. All kinds of people don’t like my favorite movies. I simply think, “eh. Your loss.”

What’s good in Grand Hotel? Every time I put it on in the background, Lewis Stone’s droaning makes me smile. He’s kind of like a shorter, more urbane Lurch from the Addams Family. He’s got what looks to be a huge birthmark on half his face (it’s supposed to be a Disfiguring War Wound), and he moans at the beginning / end, “nothing ever happens at the Grand Hotel.” It’s supposed to be disillusionment, but it comes off to me as funny because I think he’s damn right.

Is there plot? There is much plot. It is bad plot. But it is plot, so here you go:

Lionel Barrymore, a meek fuddy-duddy type, has been told by his doctors that he’s only got a short time left to live. So he’s here at the Grand Hotel, the swankiest spot in Berlin, because in 1930s Germany, who wouldn’t want to be in Berlin! His idea of a Great Last Time isn’t seeing the Grand Canyon or the Himalayas or anything like that, it’s hanging out in a rich hotel and watching rich people be rich. F**k this guy, he’s so boring, die already.

John Barrymore is the elegant Baron Felix von Gaigern, and yes somebody put effort into inventing that stupid-a** name. The Baron supports his lavish lifestyle via being a card sharp and jewel thief. How he’s good at either of those things, I duuno. I guess if you’re a rich failson, you just can.

Wallace Beery is Wallace Beery, a guy you’d feel sorry for because he has the face of a gangster-movie goon, but he was rich and famous and in real life a major d**k to everybody, and Mickey Rooney thought he was the greatest. I made that Rooney comparison up top because Rooney’s the only guy I could think of who is as insufferable as Beery, and it turns out they were huge pals! Rooney buried his dad next to Beery! Anyways, Wallace Beery is sad about stuff and he utterly sucks.

Joan Collins is a beautiful stenographer who isn’t Nobly Suffering as much as Joan Collins would eventually become famous for doing in every Joan Collins Nobly Suffers Movie.1 She actually seems young and fun here, so naturally the movie eventually has to pair her up with whiny simpering go**amn Lionel Barrymore.

Lewis Stone was right. Nothing ever happens at the Grand Hotel, nothing I care a remote fart about, at least.

I did like Greta Garbo here. Garbo is an aging famous ballerina (in ballet, you’re ancient at 35), and while I don’t give two s**ts about her ballet career (she’s Garbo, I think she’ll be fine), I just dig Garbo even in these sappy, boring roles. She’s simply got more oomph than almost everybody else on the screen. It’s not strictly acting skill (she’s got some) or beauty (Hollywood had lots of that), it’s something else I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s her “I don’t give a f**k” vibe (she pissed studios off by refusing to do most of the publicity crap they wanted). Or, as her character says in the movie, “I want to be alone,” a line that went the 1932 equivalent of “viral.” You’ll wonder why she ends up with much older John Barrymore, but at least he’s not as hammy as usual.

Director Edmund Goulding is the purest for-hire nothingburger, who probably just went “action” and “cut” and picked his nose. Yet the cinematography by William H. Daniels (Garbo’s favorite) does give this a luscious look. I would never want to go to a Rich People hotel, but if walking in the doors meant everything looked as vividly black-and-white as this does, I’d sure check out the lobby. I dunno who did the nifty production design; Cedric Gibbons is the credited art director, so a shout-out to his ghost. (He’s also credited on Singing in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, Forbidden Planet, Bad Day at Black Rock, and those are some cool-looking movies — I think this dude had some skills.)

This was stupendously popular and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s all the Big Stars being Sad. So, like the Love Actually of its day, except I never was tempted to sit through that heap of drivel and this movie’s reputation fooled me. In any case, it had a lot of imitators, movies where random strangers get plopped into the same location — like Stagecoach, where they’re in a stagecoach, and The Towering Inferno, where they’re in the 2026 state of American democracy.

MGM liked the money this made, so a year later, they repeated the formula… except the next time, they had both Barrymores again, and Beery again, but no lively Crawford or commanding Garbo. Instead, you’ve got Glinda, the Good Witch, and she’s actually fun for awhile. Until the movie decides that Fun is Bad and you can’t have any more.

Glinda was played by Billie Burke in The Wizard of Oz, and here she has the exact same high tremolo-type voice. Which is funny! In the beginning, it’s funny. Burke’s using it to gush over her big society dinner she’s gonna have, one where “the Ferncliffes” will be coming. Everybody who is anybody wants to meet the Ferncliffs, rich English people. So Burke is delighting over who she’ll invite, who she’ll leave out, and goining on and on about “the aspic.” Every time she says “the aspic” in that warbly voice, it’s a hoot.

Do you know what aspic is? It’s bone broth Jello with stuff inside like ground up meat or hard-boiled eggs. Modern “man strength” idiots would probably love it. Apparently it was a fancy thing in the 1930s. Pre-Code.com has one of its always-fun GIFs of the aspic, which amusingly looks like the lion in the MGM logo:

Alright, here’s your Ham call sheet:

John Barrymore is a former star actor, but drink has ruined his career and his finances. In real life, Barrymore was well-known to have a major drinking problem, so this tied into the public’s fascination with that.

Lionel Barrymore is an aging shipping tycoon, and his shipping business has taken a hit lately, who knows why. (Because of the worldwide depression caused by the loose financial regulation you probably voted for, a**hole.) We’re supposed to feel sad for his business worries and his fragile health, and nope, I didn’t care. However, he’s also reminiscing about his long-ago crush on Marie Dressler, and he’s doing it WITH Marie Dressler, and I thought this was rather sweet & touching. No, they’re not gonna get together. They’re just remembering when they were crazy about each other, and it’s nice.

Wallace Beery is an unscrupulous mining millionaire who’s offering to help Barrymore’s business stay afloat… but really, he’s planning on stealing the whole thing. How mean and who cares. Unless I’m watching Wallace Berry fall face-first into steaming cowsh**t, I don’t care, I hate this guy. He’s married to…

Jean Harlow, who was the biggest billing in this, just like Garbo was for Grand Hotel. I’ve seen Harlow in some stuff I like, where she was wisecracking and fun. Here, she’s supposed to be the most irresistibly sexy lady in the world (hell, I like Billie Burke better), and also a Slut because she sleeps around on Wallace Beery. Jeepers, who wouldn’t cheat on Wallace Beery? You’re an idiot if you don’t.

That crappy, hypocritical moralizing is just terrible — the movie gets to have a Sex Symbol and then shame her for being sexy. What garbage. Plus, the way she’s supposed to be sexy is doing a squeaky baby voice to Wallace Beery; “Danny… Kitty want to go see all the great big lords and ladies in the big booful house!” (“Booful” being baby talk for “beautiful.”) It’s so repellent, there’s a fascination to it.

That goes for most of this movie, really. Aside from Burke’s funny prissiness at the beginning and the likable Barrymore/Dressler stuff, this is really an example of so bad, it’s grimly interesting. Very young Madge Evans, Lionel Barrymore’s daughter, is having an affair with very over-50 John Barrymore… and it’s not because he’s a sugar daddy, it’s because of Luuv. Good grief. John Barrymore knew how to be a drunk, but not how to play one — he overdoes it immediately. There’s some believable scenes of him scrounging up enough cash for the next bottle that did make me thirsty a little. (This was co-written by Herman Mankiewicz, no stranger to liquid lunches himself.)

John Barrymore’s gonna eventually plunge further and further into despair, and as he does so his hamminess gets worse and worse. (In Twentieth Century, where he also plays a failing actor, we’re not asked to feel sorry for him.) Pre-Code.com links to this post2 which makes a case for Barrymore being a Good Ham, a guy who deliberately overplayed things because he largely had contempt for movies and preferred the stage (so why not stay there? Oh, right, money). I guess I can see the point, and I will grant the author that William Shatner was a classic example of a Good Ham.

I won’t grant that to John Barrymore here. As he circles the drain in terminal despair, the hamminess is so heavy that I yelled at the screen, “for God’s sake just DIE already!” And, when (spoiler alert but not much) he does, dullsville director George Cukor’s camera moves for the FIRST TIME in the dang movie as it tracks in on Barrymore’s Sad Face… oh, barf.3 (Also barf is the score, credited to one Dr. William Axt, and he should have been.)

I might grant Good Ham status to Marie Dressler, who soldiers through this too-noble-by-half role despite being pretty sick; she was recovering from cancer surgery as this was filmed, and died less than a year later. Also doomed was Jean Harlow. She’d be dead four years later, at age 26, from kidney failure caused by an undiagnosed case of the flu. (That’s another thing with everybody treating her as “slutty” here — lay off, folks, she’s barely old enough to drink, stop being so judgy, nobody’s a genius at 22.)

Production details? You’re gonna make me read eight TCM pages on THESE two movies? Alright. The biggest stuff I could find out about Dinner at Eight was how it was egotistical producer David O. Selznick’s first movie at MGM, and he had to argue a ton to get “actors’ director” George Cukor on the job, since studio head Louis B. Mayer hated gays and Cukor was famously gay. Just another reason to dislike Louis B. Mayer, about whom it was said that the reason “so many people showed up at his funeral was to be sure he was dead.” Herman Mankiewicz said Mayer “had the memory of an elephant and the hide of an elephant. The only difference is that elephants are vegetarians and Mayer's diet was his fellow man.”

Mayer also was reluctant to cast Harlow, who Cukor wanted because he’d seen her in Red Dust — she IS better in other movies than in this one. Wallace Beery hated her because he thought she was too weak an actor, which isn’t a judgement Wallace Beery should be making outside of a mirrored room.

Both movies are based on earlier material I don’t know and don’t want to know; Dinner at Eight on a play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman; Grand Hotel on a play by William Drake based on a book by Vicki Baum. Baum had worked in some high-end Berlin hotels. Heck, write a book about THAT, instead. Like Jacob Tomsky’s Heads in Beds. Tomsky was a hotel worker, and guess what will happen to you if you demand someone carry all your luggage up to their room but don’t tip? You WILL get your toothbrush swirled in the toilet when you’re out. (Hiya, non-tipping susperstar Michael Jordan!)

The biggest stuff I could find about Grand Hotel was that producer Irving Thalberg didn’t want Garbo’s good friend (and former lover) John Gilbert in the movie, because Gilbert was “struggling” with adjusting to talkies and drank too much. Well, I’ve seen Gilbert in other things and I think his voice is perfectly fine; and if you’re worried about someone’s drinking why would you replace them with John Barrymore? So that’s why Garbo pairs up with a dull older guy instead of one she wanted to act with.

Oh, and the movie wore out lots of socks because the extras making the lobby look busy had to wear socks to keep from making too much noise. MGM said it was 200 pairs of woolen socks a day. I say that’s total bullcrap of the “we spared no expense” variety.

So there ya have it, all the details you could possibly want about two movies you will not likely enjoy. I made it through both without falling asleep, they’re not painful (except when Beery is on the screen). It’s just sad that too few movies really gave Garbo her due. (Ninotchka is one which does.)

One thing these two movies does establish… when it comes to Hollywood Acting Families, the Hustons and the Carradines have it ALL OVER the Barrymores, and it ain’t close.

And guess what, both of these were remade! Dinner at Eight was a 1989 TV movie with John Mahoney and Marsha Mason. I mean, if you kept the basic plot (people scheming to get invited to dinner with fancy folks who don’t show) but then actually WROTE THE DINNER SCENE, this story could work.

While Grand Hotel became a 1989 Broadway musical, starring Michael Jeter and Jane Krakowski. With song titles like “Gru’s Bedroom,” “Merger is On,” and “I Waltz Alone.” On that last title, Billy Idol shoulda sued.

Recently, I was on a baseball fansite. I’m a baseball fan. Kinda. I used to like baseball a lot. Now teams demand ever-more taxpayer dollars for new stadiums, the TV broadcasts are swamped with gambling ads, and so on. The business side of baseball is really gross. But I still like the game itself, and the skills/creativity of the players, and I like sharing that appreciation with other fans.

So, on that baseball fansite, there’s posts about games and such, and you can comment on the posts. In the comments, there’s a little menu bar at the bottom, like this:

Bold text, italic text, etc. The box with the triangles is for images. If you want to post an image, you click on the box with the triangles, or poke it with your finger if you’re using your phone.

In the past, when you clicked/poked that box, it would ask you for a URL of an image on the internet. Like this:

That’s a common one when the game’s on the line, your team has a narrow lead, that lead’s in danger of slipping away. You would enter the URL of the image, and post the image as your comment, or with a comment.

Now, however, when you click/poke the image box, it doesn’t ask you for a URL of an image. It asks you for an image on your computer. Or on your phone. Whatever device you are using to access the site.

And it gives you a handy sample of photos Google has already “backed up” (to wit, STOLEN) from your phone. Like this:

That’s a bunch of pictures of a Japanese fishing net flotation ball that my mom had, and now I have it. It’s a nice keepsake to remember her by. I used a photo of it in my post about the movie Tokyo Story. I took a bunch of pictures of it where my finger was in the picture and I accidentally hit the button with my other finger a zillion times. They’re no longer on my phone, I deleted them.

But Google has them.

I guess this falls into the “you dumbs**t, you didn’t know that already?” category, but every picture I take with my Android phone is, apparently, the property of Google, whether I delete it or not.

Now, I have nothing particularly sensitive in my phone photos. There’s no penis pics. (Even if there were, mine isn’t distinctive, I couldn’t pick it out of a D**k Pic lineup.) But there’s stuff that’s private, or I thought it was. Mrs. twinsbrewer hugging a dog we were dogsitting. That was for Mrs. twinsbrewer and the dog owners I sent it to.

Oh, and for Google, I guess.

I’m not “OUTRAGED!!!” I knew the tech companies were scanning all kind of stuff all the time. I’m aware that every email or text message I send is not strictly private. I didn’t know that about phone pics, ones I hadn’t sent to anybody. Now I do. Google has them (or some of them; there’s random ones they don’t have, for some reason).

I dislike this for two reasons. One, basic privacy rights. I never clicked or finger-poked “I accept” on any agreement that Google should have access to my phone pics. Before storing those phone pics, Google should have to clearly tell me it is doing so, and require my permission to do so. They will never do this, it’s a fantasy, but it’s the way things should be.

And two: think of the storage space. How many datacenters are built, how many oodles of power and water are wasted, how much pollution is created, storing stuff that we didn’t ask to be stored?

We could be using this space to store stuff that’s actually worth storing.

Think of a website you like that died, and now all the posts you enjoyed on it are gone. Unless it’s on Internet Archive or the Wayback Machine, that stuff’s gone, and it might have been worth saving. It takes a lot less space to store text than it does to store images.

Instead, when you image search “photo of woman with dog,” you will get AI garbage created from a picture I took, and millions more that other people took, which were stored without the knowledge/consent of the people who took them.

Words that people typed on purpose and meant for others to see are being lost.

Words / pictures / video that were not meant for others to see are stored and used by insatiable tech companies for whatever purposes they see fit.

O brave new world, indeed.

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

Henry V (1944). Grade: B+

When a proud, acclaimed actor becomes his own director for the first time, and chooses to film himself as the star of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, the result’s gonna be pompous self-worshiping pseudo-intellectual crap, ain’t it?

Surprise! Lawrence Olivier brings the FUN. We start with a playbill, floating through the air, then finding its way in front of the camera:

Yep! Non-standardized spelling was a common and acceptable thing in English until the 19th century. (Hey, maybe Dan Quayle wasn’t a dodo spelling “potato” wrong, he was a scholar of medieval English. It’s possible, right?)

Then we see the Coolest. Model. Ever. (I will show it to you later on.) It’s London, circa 1600 or so. There are boats moving on the fake Thames. There’s smoke coming out of the fake chimneys. Your only immediate giveaway that this is a model is A) the “water”’s way too still and there’s clearly painted hills/clouds in the background, and B) obviously London doesn’t look like that anymore. (Not even in 1944.)

The camera tracks over the huge-a** model for a bit (it measured 50’ x 70’), then swoops down on the Globe Theatre. A Ye Olde Flagge Guye hoists a banner announcing today’s show, and we go inside the theatre. As we track through, we see what, sure enough, was the way plays were seen in those days — box seats for the hoity-toity, standing room only for the Great Unwashed. The camera settles on the stage, and we see a single actor emerge, and start to deliver the introduction. We are seeing Henry V being performed the way it might have been performed in 1600.

The audience laughs at pompous cardinals and at a long-winded bishop whose speech parchments keep getting scattered all over the place. We get views of people scurrying around backstage for the next moment. The “women” are all effeminate looking teenage boys, as they would have been at the time. We even see Olivier taking a deep breath as he prepares to make his entrance. Every bit of this seems magical; it’s like youe’re actually seeing through a time machine into the past.

Was Shakespeare performed this way? We have no way of knowing. But it very well might have been. All the details here seem terrifically researched and/or well-imagined; right before the play begins, the super-rich patrons all gather on stage to congratulate each other. I’d never heard of that, but I sure can believe it.

And a rainstorm — the Globe was an open-air theatre, at least for the main standing-room seats facing the stage. Did they do rain delays back then? They did not! The show must go on!

As Act II begins (the death of Falstaff, once Henry’s drinking/carousing buddy, now banished from his presence), we move from the stage to a tavern set. Then a set inside the court of France (the plot is, Henry proves he’s achieved true maturity by invading France). Then Henry and his army arrive in France. At each step of the way, the movie will take on another level of “realism,” with another element that’s intentionally unrealistic. (Horses riding on real grass, towards what’s clearly a medieval-style illustration of a castle in the distance.)

This came four years after another actor/director had shook up the ways movies were made, Orson Welles with Citizen Kane. This movie isn’t visually inventive in the same way Welles’s were, using unusual camera angles and effects tricks. Few of the visuals here are meant to seem “real.” Yet Olivier is every bit as innovative as Welles, in his own way — every time the presentation introduces a new mixture of realism / goofy backdrops, it’s wonderful.

Eventually we get to the famous battle of Agincourt, and by then what we’re seeing is 100% real people, real horses, real scenery behind it. Real blood? Oh, hells no. There’s no carnage, this is meant to be inspiring stuff.

It’s disappointing when the artifice ends, because you want the movie to have more visual imagination up its sleeve. Yet Henry’s proving he’s a gracious winner and wooing the princess Catherine is tolerable enough. And the movie finishes in the exact setting you hoped it would.

A very good Frank Miller article on TCM describes the roundabout way this movie came to be. Olivier had been in one filmed Shakespeare play, a 1936 version of As You Like It, and he hated the experience; it convinced Olivier that you couldn’t do Shakespeare on film. Plus, he wasn’t a huge fan of the play, and had thought about doing a revisionist version on stage as a rebuke to the play’s rah-rah jingoism. Obviously, Britain entering the war ended any thought of that.

Olivier eventually did a broadcast of Henry’s stirring “St. Crispin’s Day” speech on the radio (it’s the one with the line “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”). That was very popular, and so the film’s producers were able to raise funding and get government support for the project.

Olivier was willing to play Henry, yet he had no intention of directing, asking William Wyler and Carol Reed if they’d do it instead; both told him to direct it himself. So he agreed to give it a go. He’d already been extensively involved in pre-production.

As Olivier was working on the script with Shakespeare scholar Alan Dent, he ran into a problem — what to do with the character of the Chorus, whose speeches were too well-known to cut (he introduces the play and re-emerges throughout to prepare the audience for location changes). At first, Olivier considered having the Chorus be a voice over… then he thought of the idea of starting the movie in the Globe theatre, with the Chorus emerging on stage.

Miller also tells us the fun fact that Olivier sprained an ankle while trying to show a stuntman how to jump from a tree onto a horse — he missed. And that in one scene, with Olivier looking through the camera, a horse running towards the camera bowled him over, badly cutting his lip. Writes Miller, “the main concern was the camera. It was the only Technicolor camera in England, and they couldn't risk damaging it.” (The excellent cinematography’s by Robert Krasker, who shot The Third Man.)

Shooting took place in Ireland for six weeks to do the battle scene, then back to England for the studio stuff. This BFI article by Claire Smith and Natalie Morris describes the design of all three Olivier Shakespeare films. On this one, the superb set design/art direction was by Roger Furse, Carl Sheriff, and Carmen Dillon, one of the first women to be credited as an art director in films (all three had worked with Olivier on stage productions). Olivier asked them to create background paintings of scenery & castles that looked like an illustrated medieval manuscript, specifically the French “Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.” One winter set design after the Agincourt battle looks VERY like the illustration you can see here.

I’m no expert in medieval illustrations — the Criterion disc has pictures of illustrations from the manuscript which look like scenes in the movie. Unfortunately, that’s about ALL the special features on the Criterion disc, which is one of their older releases; this movie is begging for an updated version with more production details. Although essayist Bruce Eder provides this fascinating information — one of the producers originally wanted to do this on television! Yes, there was an infant form of the BBC, it had started in 1937. Fortunately they didn’t go that route!

The movie was not well-received in England, not at first. (Word-of-mouth reviews eventually made it a giant hit.) This from a review by Monthly Film Bulletin: “The need to keep the screen alive has caused the producers to make the first act of the play — as the reviewer thinks unwisely as later it becomes realist — a picture of the first performance as given at the Globe Theatre” … “Too great an accent is thus placed on what is in effect a very minor scene.”

What an idiot! That scene is the best thing in the movie!

I mean, there’s also the actors and the poetry. As you’d expect in any English production of Shakespeare, the cast is loaded; Leslie Banks, John Laurie, future drunken terror Robert Newton. Max Adrian is an effectively sneery/wimpy Dauphin, Ralph Truman suitably strong voiced as a French herald, and the fabulous Ernest Thesiger has a don’t blink-you’ll-miss-him moment as a French ambassador who brings Henry an insulting gift during the Globe scene.1

In fact, it seems like getting an insulting gift is the whole reason for this war, that and Henry proving he’s a Real King, now. In real life, after Henry’s stirring victory, the Hundred Years’ War continued for another 38 years, and Henry would only see seven of them — he died, probably from dysentery, in 1422, while laying siege somewhere. That was two years after he married Catherine, by the way — the marriage took place five years after Agincourt, not a few months. Catherine herself died at 35. The whole damn war was a big stupid waste of life and money, like almost all wars are.

Which Shakepeare probably knew, even if he was too busy being a royal suckup to put much besides propaganda into this one. Still, there is the great speech delivered by Jimmy Hanley in the movie, a soldier on the night before the battle:

But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all “We died at such a place,” some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?

It’s one of Olivier’s best scenes, too, as he’s in disguise taking in what his men are saying the night before. Although we were wondering — uh, dude, you gotta lead a big ol’ battle tomorrow, shouldn’t you be getting some rest instead of conducting an impromptu opinion poll?

I’ve kinda changed my feelings on Shakespeare over the years — his plays meant a lot to me in my late teens/early 20s, and I’m not awed by them today. Some of Shakespeare’s predecessors and contemporaries were probably just as good, if not better/more daring on certain subjects (Chaucer about sex, for instance). Shakespeare stole virtually every plot he ever wrote and a lot of the characters to boot, and most of his history plays are really just blowing smoke up the butt of the then-ruling family.

Still, the poetry is, at times, truly great, and the sound of the language, and some of the imagery (“and it was as cold as stone”). I do think Olivier and Alan Dent / Dallas Bower (his co-writers) could have chopped this down a bit more (it’s 136 minutes and 120 would have been better). That’s something Welles was excellent at with his Shakepeares. Yet any version of Shakespeare which isn’t too confusing to modern audiences (there’s a lot of archaic words/word usage) should be considered a success, and you won’t be too confused here. And only very rarely bored. Not bored at ALL in the first half or so.

All right, I promised you a look at the Coolest. Model. Ever, didn’t I? Well, here ya go! This is exactly two minutes long, and includes the entire model shot:

(The Soaring Choir music is by William Walton. The score's widely-praised. I wasn’t crazy about it. It’s usually not as Soaring as this part is, so that's good.

Now, since I don’t know how to copy from DVDs (there are ways, I’m too lazy to learn them), that can only mean one thing — there must be an Internet Archive copy! And there is, right here. Still support your library, though.

This is really a joyful movie to watch — the level of inventiveness is truly special. I was dreading this, because I think I saw it in school, and anything you’re forced to watch as a teenager in school is boring by default… plus, at that age, I was dazzled by movies that try to make effects shots look “realistic” like the Star Wars films or 2001. I wasn’t aware enough of old movies to realize what kind of artistry and beauty there can be in visuals which are deliberately unrealistic, deliberately like a stage backdrop or book illustration. Now that I am, this looks gorgeous. I had a great time.

Speaking of proud actors directing movies, in 1989 Kenneth Branagh would make his own directing debut, and in a supreme act of arrogance he decided to copy Olivier and do Henry V. And the result was… pretty good! That movie’s got another great cast (including Derek Jacobi as the Chorus, even though Jacobi’s one of those conspiracy theorists who thinks Shakespeare was really somebody else). It also includes some of the darker scenes that Olivier’s version omitted to keep his version cheerful (there’s a scene where Henry has people executed). I mean, Branagh is Branagh, so it’s a bit too much at times, but the guy knows his Shakespeare. Never deserved to marry Emma Thompson, but knew his Shakespeare for sure.

Les Enfants terribles (1950). Grade: C. Cruel Story of Youth (1960). Grade: C-

Right off the bat, let’s say it; Nagisa Ōshima was a fugging idiot. He’s an acclaimed Japanese director of no small filmmaking skill, and we well may have agreed on some things politically had we ever met; however, artistically, he’s an idiot. (That puts him in good company; 90% of the most acclaimed modern filmmakers are idiots, and well over 50% of the dead ones.)

I kinda suspected this when I saw Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, where the man and the woman playing the main characters were required to have for real, unsimulated sex in the movie. It certainly was groundbreaking, although I don’t think it added anything to the story. And while it didn’t hurt the man’s career any, it ruined the woman’s, Eiko Matsuda; she was condemned for having done something dirty, for soiling herself on camera. Which is ridiculous — but Ōshima should have had the brains to know it could happen to her.

My suspicions grew when I saw Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which seemed like it was putting the actors through extreme physical hardships for no good reason whatsoever, and the story was a utterly halfbaked mess. On top of that, Ōshima built a whole damn prison camp set and only used a teeny part of it for shooting. That’s typical director megalomania right there.

With this film, I knew it. He’s an idiot. There’s a long take of the main actor — who is not a compelling character — eating an apple, and it reveals nothing. While in the background we hear two former lovers who wish they could get back together, but can’t, having a “goodbye forever” conversation. Two people who are VASTLY more interesting than this dullard or the sleeping (anesthetized) woman he’s eating the apple above.

You could say, and I’m sure critics do, that this scene shows Ōshima’s “masterful control of the medium” or words to that effect. Rubbish. it’s simply intentionally frustrating. Hey, if I put on a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, one of theater’s most entertaining plays, and I did it all in a made-up language nobody could understand and provided no subtitles, would I be exercising “masterful control of the medium”? No, I’d be an idiot. Ōshima is being an idiot.

Actually, I knew that earlier. There’s a long scene where the same apple man, Yūsuke Kawazu, pushes the same woman, Miyuki Kuwano, into the water in a shipping port full of floating lumber. As Kuwano says she can’t swim, and keeps trying to get a handhold on the lumber, Kawazu keeps kicking her hands away. Actually, it seems that Kuwano (the real person, not the character) is a pretty decent swimmer — she’s treading water, fully clothed, which isn’t easy to do. Yet the take requires her to have her head go under the water over and over again. It’s a scene depicting cruelty by a director being cruel to his performer (once again, in a Ōshima film, the woman gets the worst of the male director’s megalomania).

The scene does have some aesthetic value, though — it involves a moving camera shot which is technically impressive. So there is that. But the result of it is that when Kuwazu finally lets Kuwano get up out of the water, it’s on the condition she have sex with him. On a floating tree trunk? All I could think of was “ouch, f***ing splinter city!” (Literally, f***ing splinters.) And then the plot has her fall madly in love with Kuwazu’s magic penis, like a lesbian falling for James Bond after he rapes her. This stuff is dumb as hell.

Yer plot is, after Kuwano becomes Kuwazu’s devoted sex slave, she moves in with him. Meaning her parents won’t take her back, they disapprove. And neither Kuwano/Kuwazu have any money. So he encourages her to walk around busy Tokyo streets late at night, alone, waiting for horny rich middle-aged guys to offer her a ride. They will inevitably try to rape her, and Kuwazu, following on his motorcycle, will then strong-arm the rich older guy. He’ll threaten to call the cops unless they hand over all their money.

You could, theoretically, make a semi-interesting story about this. I’m guessing that Ōshima had some social commentary in mind about the predatory nature of rich men, and how a sense of hopelessness turns even the young into people as nasty and corrupt as the rich. That’s one of the tragedies of Vittorio De Sica’s great films Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. — how, in desperation, people can be forced to look out for themselves first and ignore the way this hurts other desperate people. But De Sica cares about his characters; I get no sense that Ōshima does. I think to him the characters, like the actors, are mere props.

(Criterion essayist Chris Fujiwara, who naturally praises the movie, does suggest that the driving force behind it was primarily Ōshima wanting to subvert what the studio expected of him. Fujiwara also provides some interesting information about what trends were happening in Japanese cinema at the time.)

You could even have made a black comedy out of this plot, with everybody screwing everybody over. Having seen three Ōshima movies now, one thing I do not, ever, notice is a sense of humor. I suspect he’s way too Serious Minded for that, too convinced of his Important Ideas.

This movie is notably groundbreaking for one sex scene with an older woman (45-ish) that briefly shows a flash of nipple, for the main plot (using sex to extort money), and direct mention of abortion. I don’t know for sure how many films had done so before; here’s a Wiki page listing some of them (not this one). Most in America seem to be silents or exploitation films; there’s no Japanese ones listed.

Ōshima does have a striking style of using color in unexpected ways, and he knows how to compose an image. He’s not a talentless guy. But boy, is he a tasteless one. Consider how much more compelling a story Raise the Red Lantern is — another movie about desperate women being used as sex toys by heartless men.1 And a movie where the main character is no hero — she’s downright mean, although you understand why. That’s the key — that director, Zhang Yimou, is also unsentimental, yet he gives you (in that film) characters who you can imagine yourself in their shoes. The main characters in this movie are empty vessels for the director to pour (shallow) meaning into. It’s impossible to tell if either of the two main performers can act or not, because they’re not playing recognizable humans. (In Lantern, again, the main character is not nice — and yet you IMMEDIATELY know Gong Li is a fantastic actor.)

Those other two characters I mentioned earlier — the ones talking in the background during that damn apple shot — do hold your interest much more, although they aren’t given enough screen time. Yoshiko Kuga, who had a long career, plays Kuwano’s older sister here, one who herself felt the pull of forbidden sensuality and had an affair with a young medical student, Fumio Watanabe. Kuga tries telling Kuwano how having that affair damaged her life so badly, and it’s implied how having the affair hurt Watanabe’s medical career somehow. Instead of being a fancy doctor, he works at a poor people’s clinic and performs clandestine abortions on the sly for side money.

Setting aside how some doctors might WANT to help poor patients and women in need, how in fact both are commendable things to do — WHY did having an affair hurt his medical career? Did sexy sexy time get in the way of his studies, did he get worse grades? (Do the doctors at poor people clinics have worse GPAs?) Was there social stigma attached? I have the same questions about Kuga, how did having an affair hurt her life? Did it prevent her from finding a rich husband? Make a movie about those things, give me something concrete I can understand. I realize that part of the problem is I’m ignorant of Japanese cultural history — but I rarely have any trouble understanding the social standards in Kurosawa’s contemporary movies, although I’m no doubt missing major subtleties.

Speaking of missing subtleties, how about missing subtitles? This may be the worst subtitling I’ve ever seen on a Criterion disc, and they’re usually pretty good about it. (This is a brand-new Criterion release, not some old thing they haven't fixed yet.) Frequently the subtitles are very close to the background shade and they’re difficult to read. Just make them a blocky yellow or something, I don’t care if that looks less “cool.” The point of subtitles is not to look cool, it's to have us scan them quickly and get back to looking at the actors/visuals.

At least in this case I wasn’t thrilled enough by the movie to give a rat’s ass about which of the subtitles I was missing. I might have if it had been about the older couple who regretted their younger affair… but it wasn’t. Ōshima is a shallow idiot, and hopefully I’ve learned his name well enough by now that I won’t ever make the mistake of seeing any of the rest of his movies. They are technically skilled. I want a heckuva lot more than that.

I was also disappointed by Les Enfants terribles, although in different ways. It’s also an unpleasant movie, yet one of the main characters can really act. I didn’t get a sense that the problem was a lack of dramatic intelligence, but maybe the reverse — maybe there were too many ideas for this story to work. Or maybe, too many directors.

On the Criterion disc, you can watch two French film historians walking/talking about who “actually” directed the film. Was is Jean-Pierre Melville,2 the credited and acclaimed director? Or Jean Cocteau, the famed author/poet/playwright/filmmaker? One of the historians even has a scarf. The only thing more French would be adding berets and a picnic basket with a wine bottle sticking out. The historians seem to agree that the movie is more Cocteau’s than Melville’s.

Well, in the Criterion booklet, the late, great essayist Gary Indiana3 says the movie was most certainly directed by Melville. Cocteau wanted to make his newest lover, Édouard Dermit, into a star; “an endeavor,” Indiana writes, “likelier to succeed if Dermithe worked with a director besides Cocteau himself” (Dermit was sometimes billed under the name Dermithe). Indiana says the two artists definitely got into it during shooting, and each wished the other would disappear, but that in the end the movie is visually very much Melville’s, and the story/characters very much Cocteau’s (adapted from his 1929 novel of the same name; I’ve never read it).

Well, that settles it for me. I read Indiana’s collection of essays Let it Bleed so many times in my twenties I probably had it memorized. (Check out the essay “Disneyland Burns” about visiting the Magic Kingdom, Euro-style, it’s a hoot.) How about this line covering the 1992 campaign trail in New Hampshire (where Indiana was from): “‘When the Democratic candidates moan about “the first generation of Americans to do worse than their parents,” they’re waving a blank rhetorical flag. Among working-class parents in this neck of the woods, what was good enough for them is good enough for their brats, and if their brats do a little worse, boo hoo.’”

Pretty prescient for 1992, isn’t it!

So, that’s good enough for me — Indiana was right, and the French film buffs having their discussion were wrong. Besides, Indiana said one of the concessions to Cocteau which Melville hated was having to use Dermit in the first place. Guess what, Melville was right. Some people admire the as-yet inexperienced Dermit’s acting. I am not one of them. Maybe he’s better in later roles, but here he looks like a vapidly pretty boy toy. It’s annoying, but it’s not utterly unsuited to the character.

Yer plot here is that Dermit and Nicole Stéphane are brother and sister, living together without parents,4 and (it’s very strongly hinted) sleeping together. The characters are supposed to be teens (I think); Dermit is injured at school and has to stay home awhile. They do not look like teens, they were 25 and 26 when this came out, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. What matters is they are both enormously immature for their ages and bicker like grumpy seven-year-olds.

Demit and Stéphane soon find themselves entangled with two more young people — nondescript Jacques Bernard, and the more mysterious Renée Cosima. Cosima resembles the bully at school who injured Demit (because the same actor plays both the bully boy and the mysterious girl); perhaps because of that, Demit becomes smitten by her. From what we know of Stéphane, her impetuous nature and her temper, we can guess that she’s not gonna take Demit falling for someone else lightly. She does not.

Stéphane is a very talented actor — you could tell that in Melville’s first film, La Silence de la mer (where Stéphane is silent throughout the whole movie, and she’s still very compelling). She gives this movie what interest it has, because the other characters are essentially nonentities. You’re not sure where Stéphane’s kinda feral nature came from (basically no parenting?), but you do believe in it. The others aren’t vivid enough to believe in or not. (Stéphane’s acting career was cut short in the late 50s by a car accident, yet she continued working in film as a producer.)

I don’t see what the point of this story is. To show us how an incestuous relationship is unhealthy? Um, I sorta assumed as much. There’s nothing really likable about the characters that’s soured by their lives becoming more disrupted towards the ending. Obviously, there’s an implied dissatisfaction with the existing sexual mores of the time; the gender-bending of the two characters Cosima plays makes that clear. Yet this isn’t exactly a healthy alternative.

Indiana’s essay says that the movie shows “the antagonism between French institutions—school, family, police, military—and the generation not quite adult but already more clearheaded about what they wanted, and especially what they didn’t want, than their parents had ever been. In book and film, we’re presented with the superannuated, spiritually mildewed figures of the school prefect, the family doctor, the family lawyer, the spectral French professional class, unchanged since the time of Balzac, that does things a certain way because things have always been done that way.”

But the book was published (and set) in 1929; the movie is set in 1950. Didn’t a worldwide depression and WWII shake anything up in French life? Melville only moved the setting to 1950 because Cocteau (who wrote the script) insisted on it; Melville didn’t like the idea.

Indiana also says that money was tight at the time — Melville had to raise all the money himself for La Silence de la mer. He did the same here, and probably filming a controversial novel (for obvious reasons) had a financial appeal. Which it did; it was a popular success, and “critics endlessly parsed the finished film to decide what belonged to Cocteau and what came from him.”

Why did critics adore this so much? Maybe Melville completism — he’s considered quite the figure in French cinema. Well, I’ve only seen one other Melville film, and that one was a lot better than this one. I can guess what drew Indiana to it; he was a pretty fluid guy himself, sexually. But I don’t get how Brian Eggert can compare the doomed sister/brother relationship here to the doomed obsession in Heavenly Creatures or the doomed siblings in Dead Ringers. You actually feel for the characters in Heavenly Creatures, even though they’re headed for disaster; you don’t like the characters played by Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers, but they’re played by Jeremy Irons. Jean Cocteau’s boy toy Édouard Demit is no Jeremy Irons.

The most helpful review I read was this one by The Film Sufi — it mentions that Dargelos was the name of someone Cocteau was sexually obsessed with in his youth, and the name pops up several times in Cocteau’s fiction.5 (Dargelos is the name of the character who injured Demit at school here, played by the same gender-bending actor who plays the girl he falls for.)

So Cocteau was lamenting a long-lost crush from his youth, and the horny old goat wanted his new boyfriend to play someone obsessed in the same way. (Cocteau was 36 years older than Demit). And Melville wanted the challenge of filming a famous book and wrestling with a famous fellow filmmaker. That’s a fine reason to want to make a film, but not a formula for making a compelling one. (It does look pretty good, thanks to cinematographer Henri Decaë. It doesn’t sound so good, thanks to the musical selections from Vivaldi — they’re overdramatic and overloud.)

I’ll still keep on looking up Melville’s movies, though, for now. And this one, while dullsville, was kinda worth it for seeing another side of Stéphane’s range. (In La Silence da la mer she suffers silently — she ain’t silent here.) That unfortunate car accident really was a blow for film fans — Stéphane’s a genuine force. This French profile of Stéphane says that when Melville was a d**k to her on this film (hopefully from the stress of battling with Cocteau and not because he was simply a d**k), she right out and slapped him! Good for you, lady. And in the 1970s she partnered up with American iconoclast/writer Susan Sontag. Good for you, lady. If Les Enfants terribles isn’t very interesting, well, Stéphane sure seems like she was.

Re-Animator (1985). Grade: B-

For about two thirds of this, you’re simply going to be watching a standard-brand “so gory it’s funny” movie; stuff that was new in its day, yet it’s been duplicated a lot, and what was shocking in 1985 doesn’t seem as shocking now. (The gory makeup effects are still very impressive, though.)

Things get really good when a severed head becomes involved. A head that can do surprising things, like make an absolutely epic eye roll. Or repulsive things, including one SO nasty it made the actor’s wife yell at him during a cast/crew screening, “how could you DO that?” Yep, that part packs a punch! A very funny one — and I totally get why the wife yelled at him, too!

As American censorship rules began to ease up during the 1960s and 70s, you started to see films which were pushing the boundaries of screen violence. Titles like Blood Feast, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I Spit on Your Grave, Cannibal Holocaust, and the like — frequently showing at drive-ins as the second feature. (This had a parallel in Italy, too, with directors like Lucio Fulci.) The point of these movies was to be as disgusting as possible.1

In the 80s, though, you started to see movies that weren’t only trying to gross you out. They were also trying to make you laugh at how over-the-top the violence and the situations were. Peter Jackson, of the Tolkien movies, got his start doing these kinds of horror comedies (and some fans still think they’re the best work he ever did). Evil Dead II made stars out of director Sam Raimi and goofily handsome Bruce Campbell.

One of the most famous and influential horror comedies was Re-Animator. Don’t worry, there is gore, if you like that sort of thing! Yet there’s also oddball humor, too — a bloody corpse arm in a morgue that keeps flopping into the way, or a character putting up a posterboard “Roommate Wanted” notice with the address “666 Dartmouth” on it. A security guard who never notices the mayhem going on in the room next door, because he’s either on break or reading a porno mag (or reading the porno mag THEN going on break, for obvious reasons).

Yer plot begins in Zurich, at some medical research university — there’s commotion inside the offices of Dr. Hans Gruber. (The character name Alan Rickman has in Die Hard.) Security barges in, and sees Gruber screaming, fighting with an assistant, then dying when his eyeballs explode. Everyone yells at the assistant, you killed him! He turns to the camera and goofily intones, “I gave him LIFE!” (The scene was added while the movie was being edited, which is why actor Jeffrey Combs has the goofy/serious tone down perfectly — it’s not as consistently funny in the parts shot earlier.)

Skip forward a few years, and that assistant, Combs, has just started his medical studies at some American university. Under the tutelage of one David Gale, a legend in the neuroscience community — and Combs immediately picks a fight with him, claiming Gale plagiarized Dr. Gruber’s work. Caught in the crossfire is hunky med school student Bruce Abbott, who’s dating the daughter of the school’s dean, Barbra Crampton. Although the dean, Robert Sampson, doesn’t know she’s sleeping with Abbott and wouldn’t like it if he did.

Combs answers Abbott’s “roommate wanted” ad, and rents the place immediately — he loves the big basement, it will be perfect for his… experiments. One night, when Crampton and Abbott come back to his place, they’re shocked to discover that Combs has put the housecat in the refrigerator. Cause it be Dead (accidentally). They’re even more shocked when Combs, a while later, is fighting off a Zombie Cat in the basement.

You see, Combs, continuing Dr. Gruber’s research, has discovered a serum which re-animates dead things.2 However, it’s not perfect, yet — it seems that every time Combs has re-animated dead critters, they’ve turned crazy violent. He’ll keep trying, though — and, hey, Combs’s roommate Abbott has access to the local hospital’s morgue! Test subjects abound!

This project started when experimental theater guy Stuart Gordon was looking to maybe produce a new version of the Frankenstein story, and a friend got him to read H.P. Lovecraft’s 1922 short story “Herbert West — Reanimator.” It was first published serially (one small part in each issue) by the magazine Home Brew, which looked like this:

From the looks of it, the magazine was meant to appeal to the sort of rebellious sorts who would ignore Prohibition by any means available… and would be willing to try stories with odd subjects in them. (Backstage salaciousness, monkey glands, an American Legion tribute, and whatever “Honeymoon Didoes” is… I know what I HOPE it is.)

I’ve never read Lovecraft — if you like, you can read the full story here. From the Wiki summary, the movie appears to keep only one plot point and the climax; all the characters except the re-animator and the school dean are invented for the film.

Lovecraft’s stories are famed for their conception of an evil universe actually ruled by unimaginably ancient and horrifying gods; anyone who gets even a tiny glimpse into the true nature of this hellish mega-reality will inevitably go insane. There’s been many movies either based on Lovecraft’s work (like The Haunted Palace and In the Mouth of Madness) or inspired by Lovecraft (like Event Horizon and the very clever Glorious).3

One thing about Lovecraft is, he doesn’t seem to have been someone with much of a sense of humor, so it’s odd that Stuart Gordon was able to work so much humor into this one. It evolved after working on several versions of the story, with William J. Norris and Gordon’s old friend Dennis Paoli. At first, Gordon wanted to do the story on stage at his Organic Theater in Chicago; then, it was conceived of as a TV series, and they wrote scripts for several episodes. Unsurprisingly, the intended network turned the scripts down — they tried selling the idea to PBS!

Eventually Gordon moved to L.A. and took up with producer Brian Yuzna, who had connections with the independent studio Empire Pictures. Empire was known for things like their cheap knock-off of Gremlins:

Re-Animator was given the go-ahead with a month-long shooting schedule and a week of rehearsals for the cast; they did the rehearsals, for free, in Barbara Crampton’s rented house because it had the biggest living room. The shoot actually finished early despite having very complicated makeup effects (exploding eyeballs, bone saws going through torsos, etc). Swedish cinematographer Mac Ahlberg was a big help to the first-time director Gordon, and they worked together on several subsequent films.

All that information came from the hour-long “making of” feature, Re-Animator: Resurrectus. It’s included with the 2018 Arrow Video DVD,4 and it’s available on YouTube at this link. There’s general information for the first 10 minutes, then scene-by-scene remembrances from Gordon, the effects team leaders, and the four surviving members of the main cast (David Gale died in 1991). My favorite bit was them talking about the climactic zombie fight, where all the zombies were naked, and the movie wanted to avoid full-frontal. So everyone remembers cinematographer Ahlberg grousing about “veenies! Veenies!” whenever a weenie made its way into the shot.

It sounds like an incredibly difficult shoot, especially for Gale, who had to cram himself into all kinds of uncomfortable costumes, and Crampton, who had to film a really uncomfortable nude scene. It’s to Gordon’s credit, thought, that all the surviving actors describe it as one of the best experiences they ever had on a movie. Directors don’t have to be a**holes to get their cast to go above and beyond. Some just choose to.

The whole cast is fun, like Crampton making a great ook face when an older man makes a creepy comment about her looks, and Combs’s dedication to his deadly serious character saying incredibly ridiculous things. Robert Sampson gets zombified fairly early on, and him lurching around and grunting and banging things is a hoot. Bruce Abbot does friendly-hunky just fine, and veteran Canadian character actor David Gale has great vocal control, doing smooth/sinister plus a brilliant raspy voice.

Smartly, Empire Pictures didn’t bother submitting this to the MPAA, and released it without a rating; that meant advertising how their movie was too daring to get a rating, and that drew audience interest. It did fairly well in a few big cities, not nationwide, but it found new life on home video. This 2025 BBC article by Geoffrey Bunting says video stores in the late 80s'/early 90s wanted to fill “a gap in their inventory for wildly transgressive horror,” and how the movie became very popular with young audiences (that’s the age I was when I first saw it).

It’s still popular with many fans today; here’s a good review from 2020, and another of an anniversary screening in 2025. I think the pacing might seem slow at first to some modern viewers, yet once it gets going, it gets going.5

I actually tend to dislike most modern horror; I find the genre too grim. You’re supposed to feel terrible when the characters are trapped in a violent or existential hell. Here, when a guy is boa-strangled by zombies (in a very creative way), it’s dramatically satisfying; he kinda deserves it. I also like how the movie isn’t trying to “scare” you. Most modern horror that tries to create a scary mood is simply depressing and boring. (To me; I know others who love the genre deeply.)

And overall, I love how grandly goofy it gets once the head comes off — I guarantee you it will go to one place you DO NOT expect. Which, quite assuredly, some viewers would find incredibly tasteless and awful! But, fortunately, they’ll already have turned this off in disgust long ago. I’m not saying you’re a prude if this stuff disgusts you, that’s fine! I am saying the movie doesn’t surprise you with it. You’ll get exploding eyeballs in the very first scene!

Finally, those who know their famous Hitchcock movies will hear a certain, uh, similarity in the opening credit music.

It’s so close to the opening credit music from Psycho, I’m surprised that studio didn’t sue; maybe they never saw it. In this interview, composer Richard Band says it’s an “homage” to Bernard Herrmann’s famous score, and his version is all his own. Sure, buddy. Just like how Vanilla Ice always claimed “Ice Ice Baby” wasn’t ripping off the hook from “Under Pressure.”

To his credit, though, Band wanted the credits to say ““With Acknowledgment and Humble Apologies to Bernard Herrmann,” but “there was a screw up and [the acknowledgments] were left out.” So, that’s cool of him.

The Informant! (2009). Grade: B

There’s something slightly off with Matt Damon (with the character he plays in this movie, that is). Not because he constantly has stream-of-consciousness monologues going through his head (which we in the audience hear). Lotsa people have those. We might, say, imagine conversations we want to have with others. Sometimes we do have those conversations, sometimes our internal self-editor nixes them, thinking, “nope, bad idea to say that one out loud.”

That internal self-editor can be a handy thing. It helps us figure out which of our ideas make the most sense, and which ones are underbaked.

But Damon’s internal monolouges here don't seem to have a self-editor. He’s frequently mixing very banal observations of the world around him with self-pitying or self-glorifying tirades; he loves comparing his situation to that of books he's read, movies he’s seen (like Rising Sun or The Firm).

When he think-ologues “do you really believe the TV networks don’t know what the outcome of the World Series will be in advance?”, we start to wonder if this guy — who’s very bright — isn’t also half a bubble off plumb, as they say. Then the things he says to others start to sound a little odd, too. Like when the F.B.I. asks him why he’s being so helpful, and he tells them he was adopted; that’s a strange answer to the question.

It’s gonna turn out he is a very odd guy. Mostly a harmless one, but very odd indeed.

This is based on a true story, which became a 2000 nonfiction book of the same title, written by journalist Kurt Eichenwald. I haven’t read it, but this extensive NPR broadcast says that Eichenwald got to know the real guy over the course of several years. Several events in the movie are events taken directly from his actual experiences.

Our plot begins with Damon as a senior executive at Archer-Daniels Midland, or ADM. It’s one of the biggest of the Big Ag companies, the huge agricultural corporations. As Damon’s think-ologue tells us, if you eliminated everything with ADM-produced ingredients in it, you wouldn’t be able to eat breakfast.

Damon is catching major grief at work. He’s a biochemical engineer in charge of overseeing a new production method, and it isn’t working, the company’s losing millions on it. Then Damon tells them, he’s been contacted by a saboteur — the saboteur has been messing with Damon’s work. If the company pays up, the saboteur will leave them alone.

The company debates paying the bribe, then decides to get the FBI involved instead. One FBI agent, Scott Bakula, comes over to Damon’s house to put a tap on their phone; the next time the saboteur gets in touch, they’ll be able to record the call and get the baddies. Bakula’s very friendly to Damon, who’s cooperating fully.

When Bakula goes to leave, Damon goes out with him to his car. He says, there’s something bigger you guys don’t know about. ADM is doing massive price-fixing. They’re doing it with their overseas “competitors.” Agreeing to all raise the prices of certain key ingredients at the same time; one of the mantras at these meeting is “the customer is our enemy and the competitor is our friend.”

So now the FBI has a huge investigation on their hands — an investigation into corporate lawbreaking on a massive scale, with a hugely high-level whistleblower.

At first, Damon seems a little nervous about wearing a wire. Then, once he gets used to it, he digs it. He’s starting to feel like he’s James Bond or something — he even shows someone outside the investigation how cool his briefcase with the secret tape recorder is. In one hilarious scene, he’s walking through the office, recording everything, and then identifying who the person he just talked to is. “Hello, Julie Juleson (secretary).”

You realize this guy is so cocky that it’s all gonna blow up in his face… yet you’re not worried about it, the way you would be in a mob movie. Companies like ADM don’t have people whacked, they sue ‘em.1 It’s kinda funny that Damon doesn’t realize how badly he’s mucking everything up.

Then one day, he has a lunch with Bakula and his partner, and asks, how much trouble would I be in if I cheated by using a company car for my personal use? The F.B.I. says, not in any trouble. Damon asks, what if I was using a company jet for personal flights? The F.B.I. says, maybe the IRS would be upset, not us. Then Damon asks something else. Something that the F.B.I. was not aware of.

Which turns out to be a big problem.

This might be Matt Damon’s most sheerly enjoyable performance. For this to be as entertaining as it is, we have to just — just barely — not quite like this guy. And Damon’s made a whole career out of being likeable! (Except in 1999, when he was in two movies where he played bad guys, Dogma and The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I enjoyed them both.) What he gives you is a character who’s very smart, yet very shallow at the same time — the thoughts in his head are really mostly dull, and he’s so arrogant that you kinda do want him taken down a notch. Just not as many notches as he seems to be headed for. This dude is bright but clueless.

There’s an old cliche about smart people being socially hampered by genius — how having a sharp mind will mean you’re a complete failure, socially. It’s a stupid cliche; there’s some people it’s true for and some it isn’t. This real, very smart person was able to spend several years collecting incriminating information on top executives of a massive corporation because he was socially terrific. He fit right in.

The rest of the cast is peerless. Bakula’s F.B.I. partner is Community’s Joel McHale, and there’s a slew of people you’ll know from the comedy world. Patton Oswalt, Tony Hale, both Smothers Brothers, Andy Daly from Review. The lovably stern Clancy Brown, the lovably reedy-voiced Melanie Lynskey from Heavenly Creatures as Damon’s wife. As one of ADM’s security guys, there’s Thomas F. Wilson — that’s “Biff” from Back to the Future.

The screenwriter is Golden Valley’s own Scott Z. Burns, who’d also written one of those ridiculous Jason Bourne movies (one which had a pretty neat cast, actually). Maybe having experience writing thrillers helped Burns’s script, which always keeps things moving right along even when there’s little that’s actually happening in terms of the plot. There’s not a boring moment in the whole film. If I have one complaint, it’s that the movie shows Damon finally relating to his wife the depth of what he’s gotten himself into — actually, per that NPR broadcast, it was the real character’s wife who encouraged him to mention ADM’s price fixing to the FBI.

This is directed by Steven Soderbergh, who’d worked with Damon before a few times. When Soderbegh has a terrific script like this one, he knows exactly what to do with it; he knows how to keep the tone consistently amusing and surprising throughout. The only time it’s not amusing, at the end, is when we actually feel sorry for the Damon character a little, and we should. As self-serving as he was here, he still ends up with kinda the worst end of the stick; others deserved that more than he did. (ADM CEO Duane Andreas, a real slime who helped fund Nixon’s extralegal activities, walked out of the whole thing without a smudge — he’s played by Tom Smothers for a millisecond here. While his son went to jail for two years.)

Soderbergh does his own cinematography under a pseudonym, and does something he did on Erin Brokovich and elsewhere — he likes overexposing part of the image, so that part of it is too bright, too washed-out by sunlight. I didn’t care for it in that movie, either.

But wow, did Soderbergh’s instincts pay off on the score. He was watching some 70s thing scored by Marvin Hamlisch, and asked him to work on this. Hamlisch wrote the music for some good songs, yet I’ve always hated his movie scores. This one is FANTASTIC. (And was the among the last he did before his death.) The score has a rich hipster early-60s feel, like Bond guitars and cocktail lounge music and bossa nova beats. It’s so jazzy and propulsively fun — it fits the kind of silly movies that a self-deluded character like the Damon one might mistake for depicting reality.

Real whistleblowers are rare for very understandable reasons. A corporation or any other institution has an internal personality, a “type” who fits in and a type that doesn’t. Generally, nobody’s gonna rise to an influential position if they don’t fit in; I am not likely to do well as an executive for, say, a he-man fitness/bodybuilding company.

Which makes this whistleblower, Mark Whitacre, such an odd duck. Whitacre already knew that ADM was all about profit, not about the health of people who ate its food or the farmers who were being paid increasingly less to grow it. He genuinely seems to have drawn the line at price fixing, yet he didn’t care about other illegal / unethical executive behavior. Whitacre says near the end of the NPR broadcast that if he had to do it all over again, he’d have avoided the FBI and mentioned his concerns directly to ADM. That would have stopped the price fixing.

No, it wouldn’t! They’d have just found a way to fire him and discredit everything he said. It’s rather delusional to think you can make any evil corporation behave decently. (Whitacre ended up on medication to help treat some of his mental-stability issues.)

Happily, Mark Whitacre wound up alright, with his marriage intact, and working as the CEO of a much smaller biotech company (which makes harmless-yet-dubiously useful nutritional supplements). Whitacre’s whistleblowing, for a while, got the FBI to start focusing on bigger corporate crime cases, although that’s something which is likely gone forever now.

This isn’t an inspiring story, like Erin Brockovich was. Yet it’s a helluva good one. It’s like a crime caper movie except the crime is less immediately thrilling (and far more lucrative). With a central character who’s the epitome of blandness… until you realize what a truly odd duck he is, and keeps getting odder.

For a “based on a true story” movie this seems to be way more accurate than most, and I think that’s BECAUSE the movie’s point isn’t to inspire you or make you outraged at evil companies (it assumes you know they sometimes are up to no good). It doesn’t have to fudge the facts to get the emotional effect it’s aiming for.

Which isn’t to say it’s entirely real. A title card lays it out for you:

Bend of the River (1952). Grade: C+

Growing up in Oregon, I’d heard of this one (it’s mostly filmed in Oregon) but never seen it. I was curious now, because it’s the one of the James Stewart / Anthony Mann Westerns I’ve been watching. When I saw it, a lot of the geography was kinda confusing. Here’s a map, presumably drawn by the author of the novel1 this is based on:

The little red mark (by me) is roughly where Mt. Hood is. Mt. Hood’s in the majority of outdoors shots in this movie. The “bend of the Snake” is on the right-hand page. They aren’t very close to each other; from the “bend of the Snake” you’d barely be able to see Mt. Hood at all.

Plus, a major subplot involves gold mining, and there wasn’t much gold mining going on near Mt. Hood. There was some in Eastern Oregon, where I’ve drawn a very convincing gold nugget.

So, I was frequently confused exactly where all this drama was supposed to be taking place. It’d have fine if they centered it in “the West,” and made up some city name like “Pine City,” but no, they do actually say Portland. At least when the Coens called their movie Fargo but shot a lot of it in the Twin Cities you still knew where you were!

Yer plot is… well, there’s not much of one for the first 45 minutes or so. James Stewart is accompanying a wagon train on its way to Portland. While wand’rin’ around, Stewart just happens to stumble on some random guys in the woods about to hang another guy. (Just walk through the woods anywhere in the West, you’re liable to find a hanging, a shootout at high noon, etc.) Stewart pulls his guns and scatters the would-be executioners.

It turns out the man he saved, Arthur Kennedy, is actually a pretty notorious tough guy — Stewart’s heard of his reputation. And Stewart’s a pretty notorious tough guy himself, Kennedy’s heard of HIS reputation. None of the wagon train-ers know any of this, they’re holy innocents. But all the tough guys have heard of each other. It turns out both Stewart and Kennedy are looking to start new lives for themselves, and Stewart’s is gonna be farming/ranching, that’s what he joined the wagon train for.

We’ve got a ridiculous sequence where there’s an Injun attack, because it’s a dumb Western plot thing. And Stewart / Kennedy sneak up on the Injuns and kill ‘em, because that’s easy for Tough Guys to do. Then everybody finally gets to Portland, which is the same rip-roarin’, rootin’-tootin’ Old West town which only existed in movies.

Once in Portland, the settlers buy enough food and goods to last them the upcoming winter. Then they head east via sternwheeler2 up the Columbia River, to… where, exactly? The movie says “the rapids,” and we do see stock footage of the old Celilo Falls, about 95 miles upriver from Portland. But there were other rapids before that which no sternwheeler could have crossed, and that’s why the Barlow Road was opened in 1846, before this movie takes place — it was a safe way around the south of Mt. Hood. The Mt. Hood we see all the time in this movie.

I dunno, I guess it doesn’t matter. Anyways, the settlers pay for their goods, go to Wherever They’re Settling, various cabin-building crap happens and people fall for each other or something.

But, winter is coming, and the supplies the settlers paid for haven’t shown up yet. The supplies were supposed to be delivered by now. So Stewart heads back to Portland to find out why.

Hey, there’s been a gold rush! And now supplies are worth tons more money than they were a few months ago. The supplier who sold ‘em is welching on the deal, he’s selling stuff to miners instead. Stewart gets ticked over this, there’s a shootout and mayhem, Stewart and some quickly-hired laborers take off with the supplies.

Along the way, though, they run into some miners. The miners offer to pay $100,000 if they can take all the supplies. Stewart’s not gonna do that, it means the settlers would starve over the winter. However, that $100,000 sounds mighty appealing to the hired laborers (who actually were hired just to load stuff onto the paddle steamer, but in the wake of the shootout/mayhem, ended up fleeing the scene with Stewart & company).

See what I mean about this movie being confusing / confused, and it’s not just the geography?

The adaptation’s by one Borden Chase, who frequently worked on Westerns — he wrote the successful earlier Stewart/Mann Western Winchester ‘73. Which also has a scattershot plot, yet it has a neat gimmick holding it together; the prized rifle of the title, which the movie follows from one owner to another.

Here about the only thing holding the plot together is Stewart trying to help the settlers out. That’s not enough, especially not in the first half, where we keep meeting people we’re supposed to care about, and because they’re such stock characters it’s likely you will not care about them in the slightest. So, say, when this happens:

…your reaction is likely to be, “oh, right, time for an Injun fight.”

We do finally get to some drama about halfway through, because along with the laborers who want to sell the supplies to the gold miners, we’ve also got Arthur Kennedy considering it. Kennedy’s the only other distinctive character in the movie. Is he gonna turn on Stewart, the guy who saved him from a hanging? Or will his conscience prevail? You hope it won’t, because otherwise that means another half of nothing memorable going on. NYT Bosley Crowther wrote that the story “‘keeps you guessing as to which of its male stars is going to turn out “good” and which “bad.’” Maybe it kept Bosley guessing; not us.

The last half hour does have some decent Gritty Stewart bits, and some of the guys playing the untrustworthy laborers have interestingly rugged faces or voices — you’ve got Jack Lambert among them, who was in a ton of stuff, and Henry Morgan, who was the colonel on TV’s M*A*S*H. Rock Hudson is here, as a smooth gambler, and I dunno what the heck his function is supposed to be. Howard Petrie is suitably nasty as the greedy supplier. The Luuv Interests are all pretty and pretty generic. Julie Adams was probably more memorable being menaced by the Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Oh, and you have Stepin Fetchit, too, for some reason. Fetchit was one of those performers who played Comically Dumb Black People, and maybe the most famous of the lot. His real name was Lincoln Perry, and historian Mel Watkins says that characters like this one are actually tricksters fooling the white bosses. Fetchit/Perry isn’t playing as goofy as he usually did, and maybe he’s in the movie simply because somebody wanted to help him out with a paying role. He’d fallen on hard times by this point.

The decent (inoffensive) score’s by Hans J. Salter, and the cinematography’s by Irving Glassberg. Probably the most notable thing about it is there’s parts where they’re pretty high up Mt. Hood, and Wiki says the cast and crew took ski lifts to some of the location spots. Per Jeremy Arnold at TCM, Stewart (who was recently married with several small kids) enjoyed his Man Time as a woodsy vacation. The AFI Catalog says they had to bury steel cables in the ground and attach them to wagons so they wouldn’t tip over (which is why wagons took the Barlow Road, not this route). The film’s promotional material said it was filmed “at locations in the Snake River country in Oregon, including the Sandy River, Mt. Hood, the Columbia River Gorge and Timberline,” none of which are anywhere near the Snake River.

I basically watched it because I thought it was the last of the Stewart/Mann Westerns I hadn’t seen; Mann’s only as good a director as his scripts, yet he does have a decent eye and alright sense of pacing. I guess I was wrong about this being the last one I hadn’t seen; no, there’s a 1954 one called The Far Country. Will I get to it, eventually, out of a sense of completion? Yeah, sure, I suppose. I feel like if I did I’d just end up typing these exact words over again.

Because really, there’s a reason the Stewart / Mann Westerns I’d heard of were Winchester ‘73 and The Man From Laramie. They’re better than the others. Winchester ‘73 is the best-looking and has the neat follow-the-gun plot gimmick; The Man From Laramie has the best characters, especially the one Arthur Kennedy plays, a guy who’s really torn between no-win options. This and The Naked Spur are simply watchable. The scenery’s really the best thing in both. Even if some of it here’s in the wrong spot.

Mrs. twinsbrewer kept reminding me “most people wouldn’t know where these places are in relation to each other,” and that’s definitely true. Still, it is a bummer when you’re looking forward to a movie being shot in a place you know well and then the geography’s all gunked up. Like recently when we watched The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid, a town I’ve visited and an area of Minnesota I know pretty well. And it had… mountains in the distance. There are no mountains near Northfield. Where was it actually filmed? Oregon. Sigh.

Love Me Tonight (1932). Grade: B-

It’s Paris, and we open by seeing what produces the sounds of the city — someone shaking a rug out, someone cobbling shoes, etc. All those sounds develop a rhythm — so, kinda like “Stomp,” except movie tickets are much cheaper.1 Is somebody gonna break out into song? Sure, they will — and it’ll be Maurice Chevalier, singing “That’s the Song of Paree.” Paris, city of love, love, love, it’s what’s on everybody’s mind. I mean, this is 1932, it’s the Depression, but who cares, right? Love love love!

Chevalier’s got a little problem; he’s a fancy tailor, and one really rich dude, Charles Ruggles, hasn’t been paying for all the suits he’s gotten on credit. So Chevalier heads over to the castle where Ruggles lives to straighten things out. To avoid embarrassment in front of his family, Ruggles passes Chevalier off as a visiting aristocrat. Ya think that’s gonna work forever? Or will the truth come out in some kind of comical fashion?

Also, Chevalier’s met and fallen for the lady listed with him on the posters, Jeanette MacDonald. Except she’s a princess, so she thinks she’s too good for him. Ya think that’s gonna last forever? Or will events transpire to unite the couple? Or does everybody get syphilis and die, ‘cause it’s France? Nah. That doesn’t happen.

This was the third of four musicals that starred Chevalier and MacDonald. Both actors were successful singing on stage before they started appearing in movies. Chevalier’s singing style is enjoyable enough; he doesn’t have tremendous vocal range, so he sings simply and lets his knowing accent and suggestive eyerolls provide the fun.

MacDonald, on the other hand, warbles. It’s not a knock on her, it was a very popular singing style in its day. But it does sound really grating to modern ears, and it makes the lyrics tough to decipher. During one number, when she’s singing atop a horse, the horse startles her for a moment, and she actually sings almost normally just for a second (on the last word of “you and I will roll in the — Hey!”) You wish she always did sing like that, where her voice sounds fine; no such luck, though.

We’d seen one other musical with MacDonald and Chevalier, Ernst Lubitsch’s One Hour With You. It didn't make me eager to try more.2 Yet I was curious about seeing more work by director Rouben Mamoulian, who’d done such spectacular camera movement in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so I was willing to give this a look. And surprise! A lot of it’s very fun, especially the first half.

You’ve got that Parisian street-scene version of “Stomp,” you’ve got a doctor visiting MacDonald and the two talk only in spoken rhyme, you’ve got the classic Rogers & Hart tune “Isn’t it Romantic.” I say classic tune, because these lyrics are batty as heck. Remember, Chevalier’s a tailor, so it’s love, haberdashery style: “My face is glowing, I’m energetic / The art of sewing I find poetic / My needle punctuates the rhythm of romance.” Or the chorus: “Isn’t it romantic / While I sit around, my love can scrub the floor / She’ll kiss me every hour or she’ll get the sack / And when I take a shower, she can scrub my back.”3

The song gets picked up by people outside the shop, who all do their own variations. It goes on for a full six minutes:

Once the characters go on a stag hunt about halfway through, the movie loses a little steam; it’s less a crazily-inventive comic musical and more of a standard one (for example, the hi-jinks of having the film speed up and a horse run around a tree really fast).4 Although Chevalier befriending the stag is amusing, and there’s still weirdness to come like him singing “I’m an Apache.” (It’s not about the Native tribe, it’s about a Parisian street hood — there was a Paris gang called the Apaches, who WERE named after the Native tribe.)

Things will pick back up at the end, when everybody’s gathered back in the castle, and Chevalier reveals that he was a simple tailor all along, he’s no visiting aristocrat. Leading the assembled gentry, and the servants, to break into a goofy-a** number called “The Son of a Gun Was Nothing But a Tailor.” The fun of the opening half is back. Oddly, it seems composer Richard Rogers considered this the best movie work he’d ever done — most of the neat stuff is the lyrics, and those are by Lorenz Hart. (Hart wrote the rhyming dialogue of the doctor’s visit, too.)

There’s several fun performers in the supporting cast. Myrna Loy’s around to act man-thirsty, Charles Ruggles to be the money-mooching aristo, C. Aubrey Smith playing the same “distinguished old gent” he always did.5 Special praise goes to the invention of three spinster aunts who try to help love along by, no s**t about it, stirring a magic soup together, their giant shadows on the wall behind. (Played by Blanche Friderici of It Happened One Night, Ethel Griffies of The Birds, and Elizabeth Patterson of I Love Lucy). As a set of 1962 NYC film notes put it, the aunts are a combination of fairy godmothers and the witches in Macbeth.

I read about those notes on Danny Reid’s Pre-Code.com site, which as usual has great screenshots and GIFs. I lifted this GIF of the three aunts:

Per Frank Miller at TCM, this was basically made because MacDonald and Chevalier were collecting contract money but didn’t have any material to appear in. While their regular director, Ernst Lubitsch, was negotating HIS next contract. So the studio offered this to Mamoulian, who was wiped out from shooting Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (I can imagine, it’s an intense film), but who was excited that the studio was willing to let him have total visual control of this one.

The material they chose was the play Le Tailleur au château (about a tailor at a castle) by Paul Armont and Léopold Marchand; Marchand was the one to suggest it as the basis for a musical. The script went to Samuel Hoffenstein, George Marion Jr., and Waldemar Young. (Hoffenstein was one of the writers on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, too). Then Mamoulian put his hand to it. (Taking so long to do it that Paramount had to pay off theaters who’d booked Chevalier for live appearances after the shoot was over.)

Paul Tatara at TCM says that Mamoulian finished the shooting script after Roger & Hart had submitted the songs; that’s why the early ones have such a fun visual quality to them. Most musicals of the time simply stopped and had a immobile camera record the singers; Mamoulian planned out visuals like in a music video. Tatara also says that Mamoulian’s technical demands irritated MacDonald and the crew; one dropped a light that almost hit him. When he asked MacDonald what was up, she said “Rouben, we are supposed to be making a comedy, a gay picture full of laughter. But it's almost impossible in the funereal atmosphere you're creating.” Apparently he mellowed out a bit after this.

This Miller post gives more behind-the-scenes stuff, like how Mamoulian was surprised what a dour fellow Chevalier was… until the scene started shooting and he’d turn the energy on. And that MacDonald’s manager/future boyfriend was on the set giving her directions (Mamoulian finally kicked him out). This post tells us that eight minutes had to be cut when the film was re-released (and the Hays code was in full force); some of it had a dress being cut “too low.” This post says that any references to “virgin springs” had to go, too. The cut footage is probably lost.

I still don’t know if Rouben Mamoulian was a serious guy or not — compared to Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, easily one of the most disturbing movies of the pre-Code era, this is simply utter fluff. Maybe Mamoulian was simply someone who liked playing around with different genres and different visual toys (cinematography here by Victor Milner, who had experience working with all kinds of demanding directors). We’ve now watched some other movies by him which are simply inert, maybe because Mamoulian wasn’t given the freedom to make them his way (or was uninterested in fighting for it), yet this one’s a delight. The beginning and ending are fun enough that you won’t care about the parts which go flat in the middle. Hey, you know, people in 1932 needed pee breaks, too.

Here’s some links and tributes to the late and enormously talented performers.

Here’s a Guardian post on what Parton meant to some of her LGTBQ fans, written by a guy who interviewed her at 23 and was super-shy about it. I’d have been the same way. Lord, I basically would crawl in a hole if you asked me to talk to anybody that famous.

And some short tributes from other singer/songwriters. Billy Bragg mentions some obscure songs he loves, which I appreciate.

A nice post by The Signal Watch which also mentions some lesser-known songs; I’ll be getting that trio album with Parton, Rondstadt, and Emmylou Harris soon.

A historian and serious country fan with a serious overview of Parton’s career. There’s some takes I don’t 100% agree with, but overall this is well done.

The same writer mentioned a time when Parton basically just walked into a pub on the Dingle peninsula in Ireland and surprised the locals. She performed a song I think everyone knows & loves:

Luna Gray of iHorror has an appreciation of Curry’s movie roles; this is familiar stuff but I liked the last two paragraphs a lot. The Guardian mentions the same movies and the best paragraph’s the first one.

Here’s your must-read; an interview with Curry from last year, when his autobiography/memoirs Vagabond was published. He’s very resigned to the fact that his time is running out, and is proud of the life he lived. (No sex stories in the book, but he will dish dirt on pompous people.)

Mrs. twinsbrewer got the audiobook, which Curry reads himself; I heard some of it. It takes a little bit to get used to how different his voice was after he had a stroke and had to relearn to speak with therapy; but I didn’t have any problem understanding him. Mrs. twinsbrewer said the main thing she took from the book was the title — a few hundred years ago, actors were socially classified like “vagabonds” and tramps. Curry welcomed that comparison — that’s not someone who had a big ego about being a celebrity (something he shared with Parton, I think).

Last, here’s a Broadway tribute to Curry from the cast of Rocky Horror — I didn’t know there was currently a revival of the stage version (the original version; the movie came out after the play was a hit). The main speaker is a bit pretentious, but the part where he says Curry has millions of children? I thought that was great.

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

Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932). Grade: B-. / Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986). Grade: B-

Both movies are about a large, unkempt vagabond/homeless man. His closest companion is his dog; the dog is easily distracted and leaves. Aghast, the man attempts to drown himself.

A rich, irresponsible man sees this happening and rushes to stop it, jumping into the water and rescuing the guy who doesn’t want to be rescued. The rich guy feels a little responsible for the poor guy after this, and takes him in as a guest.

Naturally, the rich guy is going to learn compassion, and the poor guy is going to learn to appreciate every precious moment of the gift of life.

Or, poor guy’s gonna do whatever the heck he wants to do — and whatever the heck the ladies (plural!) of the house want him to do, to them. And ain’t nobody gonna learn a dang thing… but it will be funny.

I’ll take the second option, please!

Both of these are based on a 1919 play by one René Fauchois, which Wiki says was a “succès de scandale,” or something that drew interest since it offended the easily-offended.1 Both Criterion essayist Christopher Faulkner and critic The Postmodern Pelican say the 1932 movie changes much of the play, but don’t tell me what, so I can’t tell you. In an introduction included on the Criterion disc, writer/director Jean Renoir says he changed the play by making Boudu king of the tramps. (Fauchois originally wanted his name taken off the credits, but later said he enjoyed the movie as a separate work from his own.)

In 1932, rich guy Charles Grandal is pretty dang pleased with himself as the movie opens. He’s got a nice little bookshop in Paris when those were a successful thing to have; he’s got a nice little mistress as his maid, and a wife who doesn’t seem to care about anything except keeping up appearances.

Until, that is, Grandal spots Michel Simon about to jump into the Seine. He leaps in and saves him — well, keeps him from drowning long enough for a boat to pick them both up. (Simon’s big boned, carrying him while swimming would be almost impossible.)

Now, we’ve seen Simon before — he was the almost feral captain of a riverboat in Jean Vigo’s magical, fragile L’Atalante. Where he was a gentle giant, yet there was something a little intimidating in his eyes. Here, he’s less intimidating than he is completely wild; there’s no norm of behavior that means anything to him. Have this guy in your house and it’s like having Axl Rose stay in a hotel with a sugarbowl full of cocaine.

The humor here is that as frustrated with Simon as Grandal gets, he’s not going to kick him out — what if Simon ends up back in the river again? There’s also the fact that some of Grandal’s social peers are praising him as a great hero for saving the guy; if he let Simon die (and eventually you get the sense he wants to), nobody would praise his virtuousness any more. He likes being thought of as a humanitarian. And, up to a point, he likes how Simon’s slovenliness ticks off his wife.

Mostly, the joy here is Simon’s intense physicality. He’ll do things like sit in a doorway by literally sitting in the doorway:

I’ve read critics saying that no actor ever does a “smash the room in frustration” scene realistically — how you’re always aware it’s an actor smashing props, not a tortured soul smashing their own possessions. Maybe that’s true — but when Simon is thrashing a kitchen here, he’s not doing it because he’s angry, he’s doing it because he doesn’t care… and because he’s having a good time. You can tell the actor’s inner anarchist/eight-year-old is having a ball.

Simon, Wiki tells us, had a varied life: he “was at various times, a boxer, a boxing instructor, a right-wing anarchist, a frequenter of prostitutes, pimps and petty crooks. He was extremely well read, a talented photographer, a hypochondriac, a misanthrope, owner of a vast collection of pornography and with a reputation for unorthodox sexual behaviour which he did not bother to deny.”

When Simon comes back from the barber a changed man (originally, he’s as shaggy as the dog he loses), some other folks get in on the “unorthodox sexual behavior,” too. Pretty soon the free food and walking-around money isn’t the only thing Simon’s taking advantage of.

In a way, this is like a conservative fantasy — that if you took a homeless person and set them up with a roof over their heads, they would laze around doing nothing and take advantage of the bleeding heart generosity. But the movie’s not saying this is true of all homeless people, it’s merely true of Michel Simon. And it’s not picking on the rich guy Grandal for having noble intentions; it’s picking on him for wanting to seem noble, for a generosity that’s really about feeding his own ego.

The rest of the cast is merely functional; Grandal’s rather amusing in his pomposity, Marcelle Hainia and Sévérine Lerczinska appropriately pretty/buxom enough as the wife and maid. Jean Renoir’s direction is fairly simple — the early days of sound frequently were — but simple’s not necessarily a bad thing. And near the end he pulls off a very neat moving camera shot — it goes from a riverbank orchestra to a rowboat with all our characters in it. That’s quite a feat for 1932. (Cinematography by Georges Asselin and Marcel Lucien.)

Our only complaint was the very end — not that it isn't satisfying dramatically, because it is. (Simon gives a final kiss-off to every notion of polite society, and it turns out he swims very well indeed.) But, the movie should have had him find his dog, the one he lost at the beginning! Simon’s gonna get all shaggy again — the shaggy dog should come with him.

Well, the poor guy doesn’t find his dog in the 1986 version, either; but by then it’s OK, he’s got a better one. (And his dog was taken in by a rich lady, anyways.) While you can’t imagine anybody being as memorable as Michael Simon in the role, you can imagine the rest of the cast being more distinctive; and that’s exactly what director Paul Mazursky gives you.

Here, the homeless guy is Nick Nolte, and he’s one of many in 80s America. He’s slumming around Los Angeles, and you may wonder where in L.A. he’s gonna find a place to drown; the L.A. River generally doesn’t have any water in it! Not to worry, though, because in urban California, everybody over a certain income is gonna have a swimming pool.

After losing his dog, Nolte dives into Richard Dreyfuss’s pool, and it takes quite a bit of effort for Dreyfuss to drag him out. Once again, we’ve got a smarmy guy who’s playing at being a great altruist; once again he’s got a pretty maid he’s shagging, and a wife he’s neglecting. But this time the maid is the lovely Elizabeth Peña (who’d be so memorable in Lone Star ten years later), and the wife’s the one and only Bette Midler.

Nolte’s not the anarchist that Simon is in the original film; he doesn’t trash any kitchens. He’s more kind of the ultimate 60’s burnout case; he dodged the draft, he lived on an ashram, knows all the famous subversive literature of the period. He can kinda be everything to everyone; he’s less a pure mooch than he is a con man. Except that he’s a con man who delivers; he makes everybody feel better. All except Dreyfuss.

Dreyfuss is doing an act he’d repeat (with less success) in What About Bob?, the perpetually-irritated guy. Except at first he’s irritated that Nolte doesn’t want any kind of respectability, which seems snotty — it’s none of his business how Nolte wants to live his life. As the movie goes on, though, and Nolte is really taking advantage of him (including some ways he doesn’t know about), Dreyfuss has good reason to be pissed, and what’s great about this performance is that it’s not begging for our sympathy. The movie’s established that Dreyfuss is a smug little s**t, and instead of being miserable with him, we’re laughing at how frustrated he’s getting.

Bette Midler was at this time specializing in “rollicking” Touchstone comedies; Ruthless People, Outrageous Fortune, etc. Here’s she’s the epitome of woo-woo Los Angeles; she’s got a personal swami and a therapist for her dog (a very funny Donald F. Muhich with a teeny amount of screentime). She’s got a terrific scene where Nolte offers to cure her headaches with a massage — naturally, she doesn’t want this mooching stranger touching her! But when she gives in and lets him do it, she gets to let out a terrific scream, and then has a lovely moment, softly singing a couple of verses from 1952’s “You Belong To Me.”

Peña of course is sexy as hell, and when she gets bored by Dreyfuss later, she surrounds herself with pictures of Latin American political figures and tells him he’s like the capitalist exploiters of Central America. We’ve got additional characters, too; Evan Richards as an alienated teenage son and Tracy Nelson (Ozzie and Harriet’s grandkid!) as a daddy’s little princess sort. (The way Dreyfuss reacts when this princess image is shattered is fantastic; he’s got every right to be furious, and you’re still laughing at him.) Maybe a little too much is made of Richards’s gender-bending ways; I mean, c’mon, this is 10+ years after Ziggy Stardust and Rocky Horror, maybe Dreyfuss would be disturbed by it, but Paul Mazursky shouldn’t be.

Mazursky was a wizard for awhile at capturing the mood of the public without catering to the lowest common denominator; his An Unmarried Woman had some good stuff about women learning to embrace feminism in the 70s, and Moscow on the Hudson both celebrated the consumerist 80s while easing up on Cold War Russia-baiting. Here he’s got the 80s homeless crisis (the first Comic Relief fundraiser for homeless assistance was also in 1986), but Mazurky’s not gonna try and tug your heartstrings; he’s more interested in poking fun at L.A.’s self-satisfied classes (which he’d been doing since 1969).

Oh, and I almost forgot, how could I! The movie also has Little Richard. Playing, essentially, Little Richard, and he’s a hoot, saying (of course) “good Gawd almighty” and “I paid four million for that pile of stucco.” He’s a little oilier and a little feyer than you remember, but heck, he makes it work for him. There’s a heckuva performance by “Mike the Dog,” too — it’s probably not stuff any dog would do, yet it’s still very funny.

The climax probably tries to throw in too much Wackiness; there’s Little Richard going full Jerry Lee Lewis on the piano, you’ve got a bunch of Chinese tourists for some reason, and fireworks going off and whatever. Still, what starts the wacky is Dreyfuss getting funnily furious, so you’ll allow the rest. The very, very ending raises some questions about what kind of “ethical polyamory” everyone will be accepting, going forward… but this IS the director who gave you Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

So, the 1932 film has a memorable performance by Michel Simon, and a lyrical depiction of life in Paris a few years before the war (and in the middle of the Depression). The 1986 one is a little messier and has much stronger side characters. Or, you could always watch both! This isn’t a case where seeing one version of a story will ruin the other for you; they’re quite different from each other, and have different endings. Oddly, the newer one was easier to find on Internet Archive than the older one; hey, I do stick to libraries most of the time, but I wanted to watch it NOW, while my memory of the other was still fresh! You can’t blame me. You can for some things, not this.

The Dish (2000). Grade: C+

The Guardian has a series they’ve been running for a couple of years, called “My Feelgood Movie.” It’s things people put on when they’re depressed, or worn down, and want to be cheered up/energized.

Now, I’ve written before that what I want when I’m depressed or worn down isn’t a “feel good” movie. Those movies generally show a better world that will never be, or once was possible and is now forever impossible, before people worldwide embraced A**holedom. (Strongly encouraged to do so via the internet, the thing I’m posting this on.) Other people’s “feelgood” movies generally make me feel WORSE.

However, one Guardian writer mentioned The Dish as a “feelgood” movie, and I was willing to check it out. It’s got the late Sam Neill, who basically everybody likes. It’s got the 1969 moon landing, which basically everybody likes (except Gil Scott-Heron, and I increasingly agree with him).

Is it an objectively “good” movie? It’s alright. It’s moderately pleasant. The “true story” being presented is almost entirely made-up bunk. It’s directed via the “keep the actors in focus and don’t have boom mikes dipping into the frame” method; this could easily be a ABC Movie of The Week in 1989 or so. Still, it’s very good-natured in a way that doesn’t feel entirely phony. That counts for something.

It’s 1969, and NASA is sending Apollo 11 to the moon. Because radio/TV signals can’t go through the Earth, NASA needs some satellite dishes/transmitters on the other side. And one’s been built in rural Australia, in the town of Parkes (pop. about 10,000). It took serious lobbying by the town’s mayor to get the dish built there, and now that it’s part of the moon landing, the mayor’s pleased as punch.

We meet a various assortment of wacky characters in town, and inside the dish’s control center, including Country Nerd Kevin Harrington, Hot Nerd Tom Long, Dad Nerd Sam Neill, and American Nerd Patrick Warburton. (Warburton’s there as a NASA observer.)

The big day soon arrives, and everybody’s thrilled to see the launch go off without a hitch. In half a day, it’ll be the Parkes dish’s turn to relay radio signals to/from Apollo 11, and receive the video feed from the landing craft. Rebroadcasting it to the world.

Then… the power goes out. All over Parkes.

Not to worry, says the mayor to his party guests. They’ve got backup generators out there which can power the dish. And this is correct, they do.

Unless the backup generator wasn’t turned on in time. Then all the complex data fed into the spaceship tracking computer would be lost. Data it took months to calculate and enter by hand.

It turns out, this is exactly what happened. Country nerd Harrington forgot to prime the pump to the backup generator. By the time they get things up and running, the computer data’s lost. There’s no way they can get the computer running in time.

…or, is there? Whadda you think?

Think our plucky misfit collection of nerds will break the rules and come up with seat-of-their pants solutions that just might work? While the Hot Nerd finds love, and dim guard Tayler Kane acts dim, and there’s inspiring (bad) music over footage of the moon landing, as the whole world watches the signal from our quirky Australian town?

OK, sure, this is predictable as heck. Still, the script has some clever / amusing moments in it (it’s by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy, and director Rob Sitch, all of whom have comedy backgrounds). There’s fun with people explaining Australian slang like “drongo” to Warburton, and his response to being told Harrington didn’t prime the pump: “these things happen.” (Everyone was expecting Warburton, the stern American, to be furious.) Or the gang realizing that they don’t have to make calculations as complex as they thought — the moon’s visible, they can simply start from there and they should be able to find Apollo 11’s signal pretty easily.

I enjoyed the cheery (if familiar) soundtrack of late-60s hits like “Classical Gas,” and the cast is mostly extremely likeable — even the cute girl who can’t drive worth a dang is played by the really appealing Eliza Szonert. (Meaning the obligatory Love Plot’s more charming than it usually would be.)

Only one problem; none of this actually happened. Almost none of it.

There was never any power failure, any mad scramble to refigure the calculations. Now, there WAS a extremely strong windstorm, which forms the climax of the movie. Since keeping the dish pointed at an angle (towards Apollo 11) turned it into a giant wind surface, it was feared the wind might damage the dish; the wind gusts over 60 mph were way outside safety standards.

But even if the power had failed, or the dish got all covered in pterodactyl poop or whatever, there was a backup dish near Canberra, Australia. In fact, it was the Canberra dish providing the signal when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and said the famous words. The dish in Parkes only started broadcasting the TV signal well into the moonwalk — although its signal was so much better than the signal from Canberra that NASA kept using the Parkes signal for the rest of the broadcast.

So the amazing thing that the Parkes dish and its team accomplished was to improve the picture quality from “terrible” to “kinda bad.”

Not exactly a thrilling movie subject, that! Which is why the filmmakers made up a whole bunch of stuff, instead.

Does that matter? Not hugely. It’s not like the movie is lying about anything major; nobody’s life was at stake (well, except during the wind storm, and that part is the one part the movie didn’t make up). This would still be a mostly entertaining bunch of actors to watch even if they were working together to put on an amateur production of The Music Man or something like that. The official Australian science agency which runs the dish has a post about the inaccuracies in the movie; they still enjoyed it.

(Fun things from the post? The movie shows the dish workers playing cricket in the dish — this never happened, but the actors DID play cricket inside the actual real dish. They used a tennis ball to avoid damaging anything. Also, the director of the dish team — the guy played by Neill in the movie — actually had his team practice controlling the dish manually in case the power HAD failed. They didn’t need it, the power never failed, but better safe than sorry.)

Still, I find it frustrating when a movie spends over an hour on a stirring story that’s entirely bunk.

There’s a bigger problem here. The Parkes dish has played a useful role in all kinds of fascinating scientific discoveries. The Sam Neill character, John Bolton, was a pioneer in the field of radio astronomy and helped discover quasars.1 All of that’s terrific; I love astronomical research.

Focusing on the stirring Moon landing — over and over — creates more enthusiasm for / support of crewed spaceflight. And I think sending astronauts into space is, largely, a terrible idea. It kills way too many of them, it’s way too expensive, and the scientific benefits of sending people instead of robots to distant objects are limited, at best. Plus, the increased privatization of the U.S. space program has helped make two of America’s very worst and richest people a lot richer.

So the most enjoyable moments in the movie didn’t happen, and while most of the stuff at the end did happen, it’s celebrating something I don’t feel as comfortable with celebrating anymore. Sigh. But, it’s not like anybody in America saw this anyways, so it didn’t affect privatizing the space program here. That’s been a bipartisan piece of incredibly stupid.

Director Rob Sitch is, as mentioned, no master of the medium — there’s not a memorable shot in the movie (the cinematography by Graeme Wood is pretty decent, though). Sitch’s pacing at the end is pretty awful; the movie gets stuck in uplift and never manages to unstick itself.

Still, Sitch has a good feeling for the actors and the humor — that’s far from nothing. And his direction, despite having only the one “star” in Neill, doesn’t focus on Neill at the expense of the other actors. The dish team of Harrington, Long and Warburton are all very winning performers. (That Warburton’s got a great dry sense of humor will suprise no-one who enjoyed his vocal performance in The Venture Bros.) Most of the townies are fun, too; only a few got on my nerves, and there’s no point in identifying who when it’s actors I’m unlikely to see anywhere else. I wish Sitch had had the good sense to write more scenes for Kerry Walker as a local bar owner; she seems like she’d be a real hoot, and we only see her for a few seconds.

This is a decent little movie, and anybody who’s a fan of Neill should check it out. He’s not expanding his range here, just doing what he was very skilled at doing, projecting major Good Dad energy. You’ll probably enjoy the side characters enough that you won’t mind the movie being pretty much bunk.

Although, that “angelic choir music” during the moon landing… geez, Edward Cho deserves to step in roo dung for that crud.

The Lovers (1958). Grade: C+

In 1962, Cleveland movie theater owner Nico Jacobellis tried showing The Lovers — I’m guessing because one of the stars, Jeanne Moreau, had recently been in an internationally-acclaimed French film, Jules et Jim. I’m also guessing because The Lovers shows Moreau’s boobs in it. Nah, I’m not guessing… I’m SURE Jacobelli showed The Lovers for Moreau’s boobs.

Under Ohio law, Jacobellis was fined what would be over $27,000 today for showing the movie. He appealed, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled, 7 to 2, that the movie was not obscene, and so Jacobelli didn’t have to pay the fine. However, the Court couldn’t agree on WHY Jacobelli didn’t have to pay the fine. Two of the justices believed that the First Amendment did not permit any censorship of any kind. Some other justices thought that cerain anti-obscenity laws were acceptable, but this movie (which the Court watched) was not obscene.

Justice Potter Stewart, a Republican appointee, wrote that the Constitution allowed all art except “hard-core pornography.” “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

(Later, Judge Stewart regretted using that phrase, saying “that's going to be on my tombstone.” Dude, in terms of the worst things we remember about Supreme Court judges, that’s not bad at all — it’s kinda funny because it suggests you liked porn a lot. No harm done.)

The motion picture in this case was the second directed by Louis Malle, who’d go on to a long career. Malle was only 25 when he made this, and visually, it’s got the energy of a smart, young guy. There’s things like putting cameras on carnival rides and on cars in ways which I don’t think anybody had done before. Malle’s got style to burn here; what he doesn’t have is a very good story. He does have Moreau’s boobs, though.

Yer plot is, Moreau is married to the dull, older Alain Cuny, and they live in the dull (to Moreau) countryside. Moreau makes the (several hours long) pilgrimage to Paris whenever she can, to see her also older but less-boring lover, José Luis de Vilallonga. (He’s a polo player, so one presumes his attraction to Moreau isn’t his stimulating conversation.)

Husband Cuny probably knows what’s going on with those trips to Paris — he IS French, after all. With men of his age and social class, what he’s probably most bothered by is how obvious Moreau’s having an affair is to outsiders — they ARE French, after all. They can probably guess why his much younger wife’s going into town every weekend.

So, about half an hour in, Cuny pushes Moreau on this. He says to her, if you’re just going to visit your friend Judith Magre and HER friend Villalonga (which is what Moreau’s been telling him), then why not invite them over here for the weekend? That puts Moreau in a bind. She knows that HE knows she ain’t going to Paris for the social time, she’s going for the Amour. She tries to make excuses why it’s a bad idea, but she can’t come out and say why.

Moreau gets to make one more trip to Paris and invite Magre/Villalonga down for the following weekend. When the weekend arrives, she’ll be taking her car, they’ll be driving themselves.

Except her car breaks down! And she gets a lift with a local yokel, Jean-Marc Bory (just leaving her broke-down car along the side of the road with the doors open, which… why? Why would you do that? Eh, movie logic). Bory’s got his charming side on the drive, he’s a bit of a fun nonconformist. When he and Moreau get there, Magre/Villalonga have already arrived, and are chatting with Cuny. Cuny insists Bory spend the night; they’ve got a big-ol mansion, there’s certainly room.

We’re set for what might be a juicy weekend; with everybody knowing what’s going on, and everybody refusing to acknowledge it. Juicy for us in the audience, not for Moreau and Villalonga, they’ll be miserable.

Actually, it’s not as juicy as all that. They all have dinner together, and the two older guys talk (very realistically) like two boring older guys, comparing their Knowledge of Things. A fishing trip is proposed for the next day, and everyone agrees to go, except new guy Bory who nobody knows. Cuny sets him up with whiskey and a record player and says “stay up as late as you like.” This guy may be a boring drab of a husband, but he’s my idea of a good host!

Moreau doesn’t go to bed right away, and Bory’s the only one still up, and the closest to her age, and he did have that charming nonconformist side, so…

Summon the Supremes! (The boring ones in black robes, not the Black ones in great outfits singing Motown songs.)

And also summon the dullest sequence in the movie, when Moreau and Bory are gonna go on a Idyllic Tryst first by walking through the grass as night (except, it ain’t night, it’s “day-for-night,” and it looks bad). Then they make out in a floating rowboat (it looks uncomfortable) and come back to the mansion (somehow they don’t have to row back even after all the floating Frenching) and Moreay shows Cuny her sleeping kid (she has a kid), then they quietly snog. Boobs are seen. Moreau goes full O.

This deserves credit for breaking new ground, kind of — movies had shown the faces of women having orgasms back in the silent era — but, the older I get, the less I think actors should be asked to take their clothes off. I can’t think of too many instances where it actually adds to our understanding of the characters at all. You can see Moreau’s face having the O, she says “mon amour,” from where Bory’s head is (it’s not on the screen), we have a pretty solid notion of what’s happening; Bory’s taking the downtown train, and it’s giving Moreau the first O of her life. You don’t need the nudity.

This material is alright, and what happens afterwards is at least believable if not especially interesting or dramatically satisfying. Since they only have sex once they get back to the mansion, though, that whole stupid Nature Walk/Float was really unnecessary. I suppose director Louis Malle wanted it to feel magical. It don’t, and the close-ups of Jean-Marc Bory’s face are a lot less appealing than him at a distance in the car being amusingly snarky. If you like, you can skip the whole Nature Idyll; it goes from about 1:02:00 to 1:12:00 or so. Then they see the kid, and at 1:14:00 they start doin’ the title.

In an interview on the Criterion disc, Louis Malle says the kid is absolutely necessary to give this story some weight; otherwise, Moreau might simply boogie off at the end and be back three weeks later saying she made a mistake. Heck, I think she still might, so I don’t see where the addition of Kid adds much.

This is adapted from an 1876 story, “Point de Lendemain,” by one Dominique Vivant. The story was published long after Vivant’s death in 1825. Vivant’s story sounds like “it’s fun to be rich.” He was a French diplomat before the Revolution, and after the Revolution was named director of the Louvre by Napoleon. Actually, during the Revolution, he was due to be utterly screwed because he was a member of the nobility, but a painter friend hooked him up with a job designing for the new regime. Some guys have all the luck! (Jeanne Moreau said some of the other French directors of the day resented Louis Malle because he had family money, so maybe Malle felt a connection with Vivant, who knows.)

So I can’t tell you if the original story is this thin or not (or includes the same amount of muff diving); the version we have has several good actors (Moreau is terrific), yet they’re not playing well-defined characters. Only maybe Cuny gets a chance to show any understandable emotion; he’s a guy who’s neglected his wife for awhile, and he seems to be genuinely sad that she doesn’t love him anymore. ‘s Ginette Vincendeau’s Criterion essay doesn’t tell me any more about the original story, except that the decision Moreau makes at the end here is not the one she makes in the book or the script. (The script is by Louise de Vilmorin; one of her books was turned into the movie The Earrings of Madame de…)

I’d say this is more important as a groundbreaking film than an actually good one, although some of the camera placement and movement in the first half has a lot of energy to it (cinematography by Henri Decaë). The clever camerawork and the sad Brahms music make you feel you’re going to see something with real bite and/or real hurt, like Dangerous Liasons. You won’t; but Louis Malle was no slouch as a director. (So far I like his documentaries best.) And Jeanne Moreau was certainly no slouch as an actor.

An interesting side note for baseball fans and/or smut fans. Wiki tells me that the “I know it when I see it” muddled legal standards for “obscenity” lasted until 1973, and the case Miller v. California. The case involved a guy in California who had a mail-order smut business, and the Court ruled that the only stuff that could be banned was dirty stuff that “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” (It’s why nudie mags generally had at least one review of a new stereo console or something like that, not that I ever read any or looked at Moreau’s boobs in this movie. Not I, I sayeth.)

Well, the smut mailer was named Marvin Miller, and the guy who founded the baseball players’ union was Marvin Miller! Was the founder of the country’s first union for athletes also a total perv?

It’s possible (he DID know baseball players in the 1970s, they had a lot of pervs) but, no, they’re different Marvin Millers. One was a California guy, one a New Yorker. Then there was ANOTHER Marvin Miller who did the voice of the Robot in Forbidden Planet. There might even be some Marvin Millers without their own Wiki pages, but I don’t know, they don’t give out phone books any more.

Milk (2008). Grade: B+

When I first saw the trailers for this, something struck me immediately. Josh Brolin, playing San Francisco politician Dan White (the Dan White who would eventually murder Harvey Milk), had a haircut A LOT like the one director Gus Van Sant wore for years. Have a look:

No, Van Sant’s part isn’t as pronounced as Brolin’s in the movie. But there is a similarity.

One of the strengths of Milk is how empathetic the movie is towards the character of Dan White. It doesn’t shortchange that he was a deeply disturbed individual, and it doesn’t underplay how awful his actions were. Yet it imagines that part of White’s problems came from deep personal pain. How, likely, he was a deeply closeted gay man.

Is that true? There’s no way of knowing; White committed suicide in 1985. But it’s certainly not impossible that White was deeply closeted; it’s as good an explanation for his increasingly odd behavior as anything else.

None of this is a spoiler, by the way, the movie tells you that Milk was murdered in the first five minutes. This isn’t one of those movies that’s gonna drop a tragic ending on you as the big climax.

We open in NYC, where Milk (played by Sean Penn) is celebrating his 40th birthday by picking up James Franco at a subway station. They immediately become a couple, and soon set out for San Francisco, where there’s more of a visible gay community. It’s not Gay Paradise, though — when Penn and Franco start their small photography-supplies store, they get pushback from some of the other local business owners. And this motivates Penn to become a gay rights activist. (Before becoming a gay rights activist, Milk had been a Republican, as many small business owners are.)

Penn achieves his first political victory when he starts talking to the Teamsters (the legitimate truck driving side of the union, not the Jimmy Hoffa side). They share a hatred of Joseph Coors, the inheritor of the beer company. Coors was a rabid anti-union guy and rabidly anti-gay, so Penn organizes a boycott of Coors beer in all the gay bars, while the Teamsters encourage the boycott in the bars where union members hang.

Penn runs for the Board of Supervisors (what San Francisco calls their city council). Getting even more active in politics means Penn gets to meet all kinds of smart, funny people, and he loves it — but it undermines his relationship with Franco, who wants a calmer domestic life. Eventually, this will drive Franco away, and Penn will begin a relationship with another young man, Diego Luna. Luna isn’t happy with Penn’s time being consumed by politics, either.

It takes Penn a few tries to win an election, but win he does — with the help of campaigners like Joseph Cross, Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, and others. Once Penn’s elected, he attempts to befriend the conservative Catholic member of the Board, Dan White (played by Josh Brolin). The staff tell Penn he’s wasting his time, yet Penn insists on trying — he thinks Brolin’s a closet case, and he remembers when he was going through the same process.

There’s good acting all throughout this film, but Josh Brolin really does something amazing here. He plays White as not necessarily gay (although that possibility exists) so much as increasingly desperate. He’s flailing politically and maybe personally; he doesn’t understand why Penn won’t go along with everything he wants, whether Penn agrees with it or not. (Brolin’s character’s an ex-cop, and cops can believe that loyalty to other cops is more important than personal differences.) It’s like he’s reaching out to Penn for a lifeline and sees Penn’s reluctance to go along as a personal rejection. This is when I started to really notice Brolin for the first time; he was also giving terrific performances in movies like W and True Grit.

Just about the entire cast is excellent, although I regret to say the glorious hairdo Alison Pill has here is a wig; her hair doesn’t actually look like that (although the real-life person’s hair did). It’s funny that Emile Hirsch and Penn are reunited here; they’d never acted together before, but Penn had directed Hirsch in 2007’s Into the Wild. (Penn’s direction in that one is just OK, but his script for it is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a movie.) Watching this, you wonder what the hell happened to Hirsch, who was so impressive, so early? I’m sure he still is impressive; he’s just chosen to appear in a ton of indie films that didn’t get any attention. If you take a chance on unconventional projects, there’s always a possibility most of them won’t work out — that’s not the actor’s fault.

Penn has great chemistry with James Franco, less with Diego Luna; I don’t know that this is Luna’s fault, it’s just the odd way how some people click together onscreen and some don’t. Still, for awhile I had wished the movie left the Luna character out, as he is a drag most of the time he’s around. Yet the movie’s trying to be realistic about the toll Milk’s political activism took on his partners, and the character Luna’s playing is based on a sad, real person. It wouldn’t have been right to leave him out, after all.

Penn is simply wonderful. He’d always been a terrific actor, yet most of his characters had a kind of flashy intensity to them — in movies like Carlito’s Way or Casualties of War, for instance. This is a completely unshowy performance; Penn’s showing us a softer side of his personality than he ever had before (while playing a guy who was a fiery, funny argumentative sort). Given Penn’s political activism, you might think he’d play up Milk as being a righteous martyr, yet instead he focuses on the tenacity and the self-depreciating humor. When Penn starts a political rally, he begins with the phrase “I’m Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you!”

(That’s something the real Milk would say in his speeches, and it’s a reference to anti-gay propaganda which would last well into the 1990s; the idea that gay people were trying to “recruit” teenagers into the “gay lifestyle.” If it wasn’t for those all those gays trying to “recruit” young people, they’d stay normal heteros enjoying normal hetero things like watching all the shirtless muscled dudes in Top Gun.)

The script by Dustin Lance Black is very good; Black had written a low-budget indie feature of his own, yet nothing of this scope before. He’d been fascinated by Milk’s story since he was a teenager, and offered to adapt Randy Shilts’s biography The Mayor of Castro Street. But, Black said, “they told me they wanted a writer with an Academy Award.”1 Black instead started writing his own script by interviewing people who’d known/worked with Milk, like Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg (Hirch and Pill in the movie).

The story includes real political events that happened, like how terrible singer Anita Bryant led a crusade to overturn civil-rights protections for gay people in Florida, Minnesota, Oregon and elsewhere. Most of these attempts were, shamefully, successful. (The protections included “special rights” like gay people being allowed to keep their jobs.)

One of the biggest was a proposed California ballot measure to fire every gay public schoolteacher. Black's script adeptly shows both the careful strategy of the fight against the ballot measure and the rawer emotions of the gay community (who were justifiably angry and frightened).2

Black gave his completed screenplay to Milk’s friend Cleve Jones; Jones got it to director Gus Van Sant, who at one point had been involved with the Castro Street adaptation, but wasn't happy with the script. He liked this one.

Van Sant wanted Robin Williams for the Milk role, and Williams might have been quite good; he was best when he was playing more serious characters. Williams didn’t resemble Milk as much as Penn does, though. (And, per this SFGate article by Ruthe Stein, the original choice to play Dan White was Matt Damon. So, Good Will Hunting gone to seed.)

This intelligent article by Hannah Mary Farr has more information about the production, some of the things the film broke ground in, and some of the things it didn’t do. (Other actors involved had been Daniel Day-Lewis for sure, and possibly Al Pacino/Richard Gere.) Farr quotes Van Sant saying “‘We just showed the Castro as we know it. Whenever there was the topic of sexuality or there was a scene that involved sex or there was a scene in a bedroom, we didn’t relegate it to “This is the one scene.” Sexual innuendo permeates the script. Everything that everybody says has some connection to their sexuality.’” (Don’t worry, you won’t see any erect pickles, and there’s barely any skin at all — mostly you’ll get stuff like happy staffers kissing after a win, or characters in bed talking about their lives.) Farr writes that this matter-of-fact portrayal of homosexual relationships was extremely rare at the time.

However, the producers/studio were wary of marketing this as a gay movie or a political one (what else would it be?). It opened three weeks after California passed Proposition 8, which overturned a recent state Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing a right to gay marriage. (Both Los Angeles and San Diego counties voted to ban gay marriage, by the way.) As Van Sant (who is gay) admitted, Harvey Milk would have released the film in October, before the election.

Van Sant had been directing both indie features like Drugstore Cowboy and mainstream movies like Good Will Hunting for two decades, and he’s in total control of his medium here. There’s a scene with a teenager speaking on the phone that will break your heart by simply going from a close-up to a medium shot. Most of the shots are carefully composed; this doesn’t try to make you feel like “you are there” by using handheld cameras all the damn time. Van Sant said they considered shooting it that way, and quickly realized “holy s**t, this doesn’t look any different than The Office.” Since movies shouldn’t try to look like smarmy TV shows, I wish more directors would follow Van Sant’s example… but no, I can’t have nice things.

The cinematographer is Harris Savides, who had worked on four of Van Sant’s previous films; he does a nice job with the color shadings, especially in darker settings, and his work outside at night is really terrific. The movie was shot on location in San Francisco, which is very much a visual character by itself; when Penn’s dancing on the City Hall steps, it’s the real City Hall. The score, surprisingly, is by Danny Elfman; it’s got some angelic choir stuff I could do without, yet mostly is subtle and effective when it needs to be.

I think the strictures of the biopic format (we don’t really get inside anybody’s head) keep this from really lifting into the stratosphere, in the way that the 2014 movie Pride sometimes does. (It’s another movie based on a true story, in that case the alliance of gay activists and coal unions in Britain in the early 1980s). It’s far more skillfully-directed, though. This is probably Gus Van Sant’s finest film. His later attempts to do mainstream films have felt like his heart wasn’t really in them — they’re not bad, just unimpassioned. Here, he’s not just telling a story that’s important to him, he’s also using a major studio budget to recreate a time and place he adores. It’s a joyous combination, even given the sad ending.

I don’t know if this was the first biopic which used the credits to show you the real people compared with the actors who played them; it’s a terrific decision here. Despite Milk’s death, the movement he fought for lived on, and we’re seeing the faces of the people who did (and are doing) the fighting. It helps make the finish a moving one, not just a downer.

I think just about everybody’s seen this by now, haven’t they? Still, it’s worth a rewatch if you haven’t caught it for awhile, just for how fantastic both Penn and Brolin are… or, should I say, how faaaabulous! No; that’s not the kind of movie this is. Fantastic works just fine.

It Was Just an Accident (2025). Grade: B

A family driving at night in Iran runs over an animal (we don’t have to see it, fortunately) and this does something to their car. It stops running in front of a garage; the man inside says the nearest fancy mechanic is a ways off, but he’ll see what he can do.

There’s another man inside the garage, Vahid Mobasseri. Mobasseri chooses to stay out of sight and observe. Something about the car owner is throwing him off; it’s not clear what. We do hear the driver making a strange squeaking sound as he walks.

The next day, Mobasseri goes to visit an old friend at a bookstore. He tells the friend, I’ve found him — I’ve found Peg Leg. I’m sure of it. The friend advises Mobasseri not to be too hasty, he realizes why Mobasseri is upset.

Because “Peg Leg” was their nickname for a prison guard. The guard who tortured both of them.

This is the eleventh film by the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. Since starting this blog, the happiest discovery I’ve made has been Jafar Panahi’s movies, and I did so strictly on a whim, because I’d liked the premise of one, Offside. (Girls who aren’t allowed into a soccer stadium sneak in anyways because they’re huge soccer fans.) I’d never heard of Panahi before that.

Panahi uses mostly non-professional actors, and generally gets terrific performances from them; it’s something only a handful of great directors have been able to do, like Vittorio de Sica. (Who Panahi acknowledges learning a great deal from.) In an interview on this Criterion disc, he explains part of his method — he tells the actors to shape the dialogue into what feels most natural for them to say, and not to worry about getting the lines exactly right. It helps make the performances feel more natural. It also helps to have been doing this for 30 years, as Panahi has.

He also has one of the great humane temperaments of film history — it’s up there with De Sica’s, and Renoir’s. In Panahi’s movies, you almost never see anyone who could be considered the “bad guy.” You might have people who are representatives of a bad government (the Iranian government has “officially” banned Panahi from making films), but they are simply doing what they have to do to stay out of trouble. In a Panahi film, “everyone has their reasons” — something Renoir once said about his characters.

After Mobasseri identifies Peg Leg, he follows him around for a bit, then brains Peg Leg with a shovel and throws him into his white van. He drives out to the desert and starts digging a hole (which is easy here, like in most grave-digging movies, but in real life would be really hard). Mobasseri waits for Peg Leg to come around. When he does, Mobasseri begins burying him alive. Peg Leg says he’s mistaken, he was never a prison guard. Check my leg; take off my prosthetic and check the scars. They’re fresh, I log my leg last year, these scars aren’t from many years ago. Mobasseri checks the leg; the scars do, in fact, seem rather irritated and red.

So THEN he goes and asks his friend at the bookstore for advice. He’s already done the hasty thing; he’s already kidnapped a guy, and nearly buried him alive. He needs to find a way to confirm it’s really Peg Leg. His friend says, go see a woman he knows, she’ll know what to do.

The woman turns out to be a wedding photographer (this looks to be as lucrative and as formulaic a gig as it is here). She spent time in the same political prison; she’s also been tortured by Peg Leg. So, as it turns out, has the soon-to-be bride; so has the photographer’s hotheaded friend. And none of them can be 100% sure that Peg Leg is, actually, Peg Leg.

This becomes a story about the five different characters and their five different personalities. Mobasseri, the photographer, her hotheaded friend, the bride & groom. As usual in one of Panahi’s movies, the way these people act is not the way you’d necessarily expect them to, yet it still feels perfectly believable. So, the meekest might turn out to be the angriest, and the angriest might turn out to be the one who goes “screw this, I’m out” before anyone else does.

I’ve read the movie described as a thriller, yet it really isn’t. There’s no hiding from the cops, there’s no near-escape attempts by Peg Leg (who is kept drugged for most of the movie). The one time that the group’s arguing attracts the attention of security guards, they’re pretty mellow and easy to bribe. (Hilariously, they carry card readers for their bribes; I’m surprised the U.S. hasn’t adopted this tactic for every level of government yet, although the current crooks in charge don’t watch foreign films.)

Yet there is an underlying tension, nonetheless. Are the characters going to kill Peg Leg, and if not, what’s going to happen when they let him go?

The situation’s a little like the one in Death and the Maiden, a solid 1994 movie directed by a fairly rotten man (and based on a play by a Chilean writer who had to go into exile once tyrants took power). In Death and the Maiden, Sigourney Weaver has captured Ben Kingsley; she’s convinced he was her former jailer/torturer. Yet she wants him to confess before she kills him. Naturally, Kingsley denies it; he might be genuinely innocent, he might be the torturer trying to save his life.

But in that film, the brutal regime that Kingsley worked for is long gone. So, if it turns out that Kingsley is, indeed, a former torturer, Weaver has the option to let him go. He can’t go to the cops and say “this lady held me prisoner!” or she’ll say WHY she held him prisoner; she’ll identify him as a former torturer and his reputation will be ruined.

Here, the brutal regime is still very much in power. So there’s only four possibilities:

1). Kill someone who might be innocent; have that on your conscience.
2). Kill someone who’s guilty; have that on your conscience.
3). Let an innocent man go free; he’s almost certainly going to say “these crazy people kidnapped me” and the group will certainly be in big trouble.
4). Let a guilty man go free; he’ll DEFINITELY go to the authorities, you will definitely be in big trouble, and who knows, maybe your friends and family might, too.

For those who’ve seen other Panahi movies, the “kill him” option seems highly improbable; he doesn’t have characters do things like that. And yet you do still wonder, in the back of your mind, if it would happen (maybe by accident, like in the title — maybe they’ll over-sedate Peg Leg).

Especially once, about two-thirds of the way through, Mobasseri pays a small gratuity at a hospital with his debit card. The moment passes quickly, the movie doesn’t call attention to it, yet once you see it, you know “letting him go and hoping he can’t identify who kidnapped him” is no longer an option. Mobasseri’s card is tied to that gratuity, that gratuity is tied to whomever kidnapped Peg Leg.

When this ends, you very likely will not have seen the ending coming — but it seems like the only ending the movie COULD have had. And it is not a grim or unsatisfying ending, although it ain’t exactly a laff riot.

There are funny moments in the movie; the bribe card readers, for example. Or, when a character is fleeing a desperate situation, and a relative gives them snacks for the trip; here honey, enjoy your Flee Muffins. Panahi isn’t out to make you miserable watching the movie; he’s not going to pile on the sufferings to let you know that the Iranian government is awful. You already know it is.

The government had put Panahi in prison. His first two films were non-political, they showed kids facing problems (how to get a newly-bought goldfish home, what to do if you’re lost). The goldfish one apparently became a New Year’s favorite for awhile. It was his third film, The Circle, that started Panahi’s political / legal troubles. It’s about the problems faced by Iranian women in a society where women have fewer rights than men (a woman alone cannot travel without special permissions, for example). The government wanted several scenes changed or cut; Panahi refused. The Circle was banned from general release, as have all of Panahi’s subsequent films; since 2011, he’s been making movies on the sly, since he’s officially banned from doing any such thing.

Panahi’s been in prison three times, once for seven months at a time; he himself has never been physically tortured, but he’s known people who were. He says this movie was inspired by those people, who one could well imagine wanting revenge on their torturers. Yet wanting it and getting it aren’t the same thing.

One longtime activist who’s spent years in and out of prison is Mehdi Mahmoudian;1 Panahi met him in prison, and invited him to co-write some of the dialogue here.2 Criterion essayist Sheida Dayini says that Mahmoudian’s kidneys were permanently injured from the beatings he received; in the movie, Mobasseri has the same problem. In real life, Mahmoudian did meet one of his torturers outside prison, who said he was ashamed of what he’d done, and was just following orders. (You think any of our Gestapo-like torturers will ever feel ashamed? Not many, I guess. Not many at all.)

All of the cast is good; Panahi’s got this style of filmmaking down to an art. Hadis Pakbaten has a strong scene describing the worst that happened to her in prison, and as the main character, Mobasseri makes a perfectly good Iranian Everyman. The longest uncut scenes go to Mariam Afshari, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, and Ebrahim Azizi; per this post, Azizi is the only member of the cast who had professional acting experience.

I’ve got two criticisms of the movie; neither are major, and one’s almost unavoidable. The first is how I don’t quite buy the way Peg Leg (Azizi) is simply kept sedated for most of the movie. Since this isn’t a realistic thriller/crime film, it’s a morality play, that doesn’t matter much. The other’s how the movie feels a bit claustrophobic. Naturally, the kidnappers are going to want to avoid the outside world as much as possible, and shooting much of the movie in remote areas makes it easier for Panahi to avoid being detected by the authorities. The drawback is that this movie doesn’t show us everyday Iranian life the way that Offside or Taxi or The Circle did. This could, in fact, take place in any country with political prisons. Still, cinematographer Amin Jafari makes the most of the limited locations; the one you see in the poster image up top is shot very well.

There’s two interviews included on the Criterion disc, one a panel interview at Cannes, the other a one-on-one with Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani. The Cannes one I found frustrating; most of the actors from the film are there, and nobody asks the question I’d want answered, which is “are you worried that appearing in an illegal film could get you in trouble?” The Bahrani one is pretty good; Panahi discusses his moviemaking process, and says that, yes, the tree you see in the header image, the tree next to where the grave is dug, is a reference to Waiting For Godot. He also mentions the movies he learned the most from; Hitchcock, where he learned the value of having a shot end when it has nothing more to show you, and Bicycle Thieves, where he learned that extending a shot for its own sake can have power, too.

Well, I would say that for indie low-budget filmmakers, you could learn something from watching Panahi’s movies, too. Watch how he’ll do things like film actors in the distance, so if they’re not necessarily doing the great facial expressions a professional would, it doesn’t matter as much. Or the way that the most dramatic scene takes place outdoors at night for similar reasons. As for how to get such convincing performances from amateurs, though, good luck — there’s few who’ve ever been this good at it.

If you haven’t seen any of Panahi’s movies before, I’d start with Offside, which is the most joyous, or Taxi, which gives you the widest view of life in Tehran (and introduces us to the wonderful real-life activist Nasrin Sotoudeh). For those who know and admire his work, this one’s a welcome new addition. How he keeps getting these things made when he’s not supposed to be making them is amazing. (Handy use of the bribery card readers, perhaps?)

I wonder in Panahi will eventually get to make a movie about life during the current insane U.S. war on his country; maybe he wouldn’t even want to. Panahi likes to find the good in people; I don’t know if even he could see the good in attackers who blew up a school full of little girls. Yet I imagine Panahi could see the good, the flawed good, in the Americans who don’t want their country to be doing such horrible things, even though we’ve done them again, and again.

I don’t suppose he appreciated the praise for the film given by one Reza Pahlavi, who Wiki lists as the “Iranian crown prince in exile.” Yes, after we used the C.I.A. to overthrow Iran’s democratically-elected government in 1953, we sure did install Pahlavi’s dad as our puppet ruler! No doubt Pahlavi still dreams of being installed on the throne, too. F**k right off, you wanker.3

Part of me wished Panahi’s movies had more people saying “f**k off, you wanker.” But they do show anger and outrage in their own way. It’s the anger and outrage of someone who’s lived under tyranny for so long that they know anger and outrage aren’t enough. Panahi’s movies are some of the most intelligent political statements I’ve seen, because he doesn’t use them to make political statements. He’s making movies about people and the choices they make under a tyrannical system. Even prison guards have choices; even their victims do. What choices would you make? Most of us like to imagine the noblest ones. Yet the way it works out is rarely as perfect as that. Panahi sees the imperfections in people, and empathizes with them anyways. It’s a helluva gift — it’s a helluva CHOICE.

Notting Hill (1999). Grade: C

Richard Curtis, the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral (never saw it), sometimes would fantasize about dating a Famous Person. “When I was lying sleepless at nights I would sometimes wonder what it would be like if I just turned up at my friends’ house, where I used to have dinner once a week, with the most famous person at that time, be it Madonna or whomever. It all sprang from there. How would my friends react? Who would try and be cool? How would you get through dinner? What would they say to you afterwards?”

“That was the starting point, the idea of a very normal person going out with an unbelievably famous person and how that impinges on their lives.”

Huh. I mean, I think that’s more something a 15-year-old might imagine more than a 40-year-old, but I suppose it’s harmless enough. We all think odd things when trying to lull ourselves to sleep.

I sometimes imagine an afterlife where I emerge aged about 15 or so, in about 1985 or so, knowing all the music I love now (that was written after 1985), but being the one to write it first. Which songs I would do, what kind of a band to put together, etc. (In this fantasy I can perform instruments and sing a little, plus all the bandmembers would be excited to do what I asked them to.)

It turns out Richard Curtis has written a movie kinda like that! Called Yesterday. A guy’s hit by a bus, and when he wakes up, he lives in a world where the Beatles have never existed, and starts doing the songs himself. I never saw the movie, it wasn’t very well-received. Some things are better to put yourself to sleep with than to try and turn into a movie.

Our plot here is that Hugh Grant, a meager little bookshop owner in a fashionably bohemian London neighborhood, meets a super-famous American, who is fortunately not Madonna, she’s Julia Roberts. Grant does his (by then standard) stammer-yammer bit, and she’s charmed by it. She buys a few books and leaves the store.

A few minutes later, Grant goes to get some beverages for himself and his co-worker, and when walking back, manages to crash into Roberts, spilling the beverages all over her. He mentions that he lives right next to the store, and she’s welcome to come into his place and clean up. Oddly, she takes him up on this (the fact that he’s as handsome as Hugh Grant likely doesn’t hurt).

Grant’s stammer-yammer bit is a little too polished here, but I do like the scene where she comes into his place and he’s scrambling to tidy up the mess while she’s in the bathroom. Have we seen the “messy bachelor scrambles to tidy up” scene a zillion times? Sure. Yet Grant’s at his best when he’s self-effacing, so this scene’s a good one for him. As Roberts gets ready to leave, she unexpectedly kisses Grant, and then boogies on out.

What follows is the most likable passage in the movie. A few days later, Grant’s slovenly roommate Rhys Ifans tells him some American lady called, and he doesn’t quite remember her contact details. Ifans really does seem the type — he’s the disgusting man-child we’ve seen pretty frequently in British movies/TV, the kind who’s amusing to watch / tell stories about but would actually be hell to live with. (Ifans, at first, gives the role some real energy, and he’s very funny early on here.) Grant’s flabbergasted, and understandably so — it was a one-in-a-million chance she’d call him, and now he can’t call her back? What a screwup.

Fortunately, he knows the hotel she’s staying at, and Roberts told him enough about her fake name she’s staying under, so Grant is able to bluff his way into her hotel room. Where Roberts is part of a “press junket” — she and some other stars from her latest film are answering interview questions from the media, one reporter at a time for five minutes each. (Grant is pretending he’s a reporter from Horse and Hound magazine.) Grant and Roberts kind of dance around each other a bit, but eventually it’s settled that he’s gonna take her to dinner that evening.

Dinner being his sister’s birthday party; several of Grant’s friends are there as well.1 All of them (except one) recognize Roberts immediately, and most of them try not to act too star-struck. It turns out the friends have an annual tradition of nominating themselves as the most pitiable person there, and each tells their own sob story (including one who was in an accident awhile back and is adjusting to spending the rest of her life using a wheelchair). They’re about to vote on the winner when Roberts says, wait a minute, I get to tell mine too.

She says that life as a movie star isn’t all its cracked up to be. Pretty soon, she’ll be too “old” to get any decent parts. She’s got zero privacy. Her love life has always been a shambles, and every heartbreak is spread all over the media.

The assembled think about it, then go, nah, you’re rich and successful, sorry, we ain’t buying it! It’s a genuinely funny moment.

However, the movie’s going to spend basically the next hour trying to convince us that we SHOULD feel oh-so-sorry for this rich, successful person.

The burgeoning Grant/Roberts relationship has an awful lot of charm to it — they’re both intelligent, gorgeous actors, and they seem like a lovely fit together. So as the movie lurches from one misstep to another, it’s like a slow leak of all the goodwill it’s built up so far. The movie never goes, entirely, flat, you won’t hate it when it’s over. But you likely won’t feel very warmly about it either.

When I think about it, something started to feel off during that dinner/party scene. Why was Grant’s sister (Emma Chambers) presented as such an embarrassingly star-struck nitwit? (It’s like one of those “too pushy celebrity fans” who might bother that week’s guest star in a terrible SNL skit.) Why is Gina McKee someone who’s recently suffered a an extreme injury? It’s great to have more characters with mobility challenges in movies, but why make it recent? I don’t get it. To make the friends more “real”? Then why have the stock joke of Tim McInnerny as the world’s worst chef? (Why do they keep having him cook every week if he’s the world’s worst chef?)

The more you think about this movie, the more questions you’ll have. Hugh Grant runs a “travel bookstore”? Who runs a “travel bookstore”? He tells us in narration that the bookstore isn’t doing well (gee I wonder WHY), so what is he living on? Is he just scraping by? Is that why he shares a flat with the slob Rhys Ifans? Why doesn’t he share another flat with somebody more sedate and neat? Does England just ASSIGN people roommates, like in college?

What is comes down to is that screenwriter Richard Curtis can come up with the occasional good gag, and a decent premise for a movie, but he can’t actually write believable human beings (maybe he doesn’t know any outside of showbiz). When you think about it, neither Grant nor Roberts has any distinguishing human characteristics. (Except that she’s good at climbing fences and he’s not.) The Grant character, like all the Grant characters up to this point, seems a little shy and nerdy — so why does he sell travel books? He doesn’t seem the adventurous type. While if Roberts is such a big star, why are all the movies she’s shown in such garbage? How garbagey they are scores an easy laugh, but it also means either Roberts is a cynic who knows her audience wants trash, or a shallow ditz who doesn’t know she’s is trash. (The script has her “mature” by appearing in a Henry James adaptation. There’s never been a good Henry James adaptation — except The Innocents.)

We saw this because I like Grant and remembered this movie fondly; also, because I’d seen an adaptation of Persuasion by the same director Roger Mitchell, and it was well-acted-yet-lifeless.2 So, my thought was “at least he did Notting Hill, that was good.” Not really.

I mean the stars are great, and Grant’s family/friends are fun… but Curtis’s script keeps bringing the family/friends along too much (to distract the audience from how annoying the Grant/Roberts plot is getting?) and Mitchell’s making incredibly poor decisions with how to use them. (Eventually, Rhys Ifans’s slob character joins the lovable Scooby Gang, too, ruining the fun antisocial aspect of his character.) When Grant gets into a car to have a last-second scramble to win Roberts over (a staple of romcoms, the last-second scramble, alas after 2001 you can’t have anyone running through the airport anymore), the whole gang has to pile in the car with him. For no reason except to have Mitchell put “Gimme Some Lovin’” on the soundtrack and have everyone yell wacky things as the car careens through traffic. If you remember liking this movie, it’ll be because you’ve forgotten how un-fun this scene is.

At this point the movie is recalling its own high points — it feels like it’s “fan servicing” itself. (That term refers to when a sequel or remake has to throw in as many well-loved moments from the original as possible.) It turns out Roberts is giving a press conference at a hotel and Grant weasels in using his Horse and Hound fake credentials again. Ah, yes, we remember when that scene was funny. Thanks Mitchell/Curtis, now you’ve ruined it. Oh, and Curtis positively loves the worst line in the movie, when Roberts says, “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.” (What is she, 12?) Curtis loves the line so much he has Grant repeat it to the family/friends and they all decide that means she’s a keeper. It would make my friends roll their eyes.

The Guardian’s Tim Adams had a perceptive 2009 post about what constitutes the romcoms of “Curtisland”: “an apolitical place, full of can-do possibility, obsessed with the educated middle class, perfectly relaxed about the filthy rich, much more in love with sentiment than ideas, and insatiable in its optimism; it was also in thrall to the idea of happy endings.” Adams compares this to the (shallow) centrism of Tony Blair; one could also compare the classless never-never land of Nora Ephron to the shallow centrism of the Clinton years. Where all the best people are yuppie-adjacent; no retail workers like in The Shop Around the Corner need apply.

Adams mentions that About a Boy is cut from the same cloth, and I disagree; that movie’s by a GOOD writer, Nick Hornby. People in Hornby movies DO have real personalities and real feelings; they can hurt, and hurt each other. They’ll generally have happy endings, but they’re not going to get there in this formula (and increasingly frustrating) fashion. If you want to identify the turning point where Hugh Grant started going from “annoyingly cutesy” to someone playing actual characters, About a Boy is the one to see. (And, not a rom-com, but Grant is spectacularly funny in the great miniseries A Very English Scandal — as a politician trying to cover up his own messy sex life in the most cowardly and most hapless way.)

For those who like this movie, well, they’ll have stopped reading awhile ago. But they can click on an entertainment website post with 20 facts about the movie, largely very pointless trivia. Most interesting to me was that Curtis superfans would sign the blue door featured in this movie, the door to an actual London flat Curtis had once lived in. Yet by the time this was made, he lived in “a converted chapel” with “a courtyard garden and a 1,000-square-foot reception room.” Nice to know that rich English moviemakers can be just as ostentatious as American ones.

That post also says that Roberts thinks her character handles her unwelcome media attention entirely badly in the movie, and on another entertainment website Grant says of his bookseller here “why doesn’t my character have any balls?” So they both disliked the same things I did about the entire second half here.

Incidentally, Mike Newell, who had directed Four Weddings and a Funeral, turned down this movie, reasoning he’d already “done a Notting Hill before.” He directed Pushing Tin instead, and I remember kinda liking that one. In fact, I’ve liked several Mike Newell movies.

Does that mean I’m eventually gonna surrender and watch Four Weddings and a Funeral, finally? Maybe someday. But, fortunately, that day is not today.