2019 Round Up

Attack of the Killer Cockatoo!

Ruth Donnelly in LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT.

I didn’t want to go off for the holidays without posting another blog, particularly since my laptop doesn’t access Blogger the same way my desktop computer does. With everything going on around me right now (long story, boring), I haven’t had a chance to get my thoughts together on anything new I’ve seen. Suffice to say I was pleasantly pleased by A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, though I think the acting honors should be going to Matthew Rhys as the angst-ridden magazine writer, his performance keeps the film from dissolving into sentimentality, rather than Tom Hanks’ admittedly expert impersonation of Fred Rogers.

All of these started out as Facebook posts, but they haven’t all gone to the same pages, so this is really just a wrap-up of things I saw this year that were worth some kind of comment. In addition, I’ve made some revisions and added a few special treats for the faithful. Nonetheless, feel free to skim. There won’t be a quiz.

The Beguiled (1971)

Pamelyn Ferdin discovers the wounded Clint Eastwood

 

Visually, Don Siegel’s Gothic horror is a stunner. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees creates images as good as any in Ingmar Bergman’s color films. The tale of a wounded Union soldier taken in by a Southern women’s school has some great horror moments and fine work from Geraldine Page, Elizabeth Hartman and child actress Pamelyn Ferdin. Clint Eastwood is good when his character is acted upon. All the women want a little Eastwood to call their own, and it’s easy to see why. But when he has to drive the action toward the end, he’s pretty embarrassing. I don’t think he really learned how to act until he got too old to take his clothes off.

The Big Clock (1948)

This is one beautiful machine of a film noir, with its melodramatic twists and comic punch lines carefully set up. I’ve never been a fan of Ray Milland’s, but as long as he isn’t reaching for big emotional effects, he’s serviceable as a true-crime editor trying to get out of a frame-up for murder. The real stars are Charles Laughton — deliciously slimy as his boss, modeled on Henry Luce — George Macready as Laughton’s second-in-command, Rita Johnson as Laughton’s terminally sophisticated mistress and Elsa Lanchester as a scene-stealing artist.  If you listen closely, you’ll catch Noel Neill early on as an elevator operator. John Farrow directs stylishly and cast his wife, Maureen O’Sullivan, effectively in the female lead. Is it an after-effect of watching him in Gilda, or is Macready once again playing a coded gay character?

Broadway Melody of 1940

The script is aggravating because it keeps getting in the way of the musical numbers, and I could do without the operatic renditions of “I Concentrate on You” and “Begin the Beguine.” At least the latter is followed by a swing rendition by the Music Maids, which acts as a palate cleanser. And Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell’s dancing is just sublime. Early on, George Murphy and Powell share a dance duet with some fast footwork, and he looks like a dancer trying to keep up. Astaire has a similar routine with Powell later on, and he makes each move a work of art, like everything he ever did.

Broadway Rhythm (1944)

Even the worst MGM musicals have at least a number or two that’s worth watching. This one has a horrible script that can’t make up its mind what it’s about and Ginny Simms, a big-band singer Louis B. Mayer tried to turn into a star until she declined his marriage proposal. She sings well, but next to her even a serviceable actor like George Murphy looks like one of the Barrymores (and as a dancer, he makes a good Republican senator). Charles Winninger and Gloria DeHaven try to put some energy into the tired material. But the real pull is Nancy Walker belting out “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet,” Lena Horne doing “Brazilian Boogie” (an exercise in cultural appropriation if ever there was one) and “Somebody Loves Me” and Hazel Scott playing a swinging version of “The Minute Waltz.” It seems almost unfair that one of Horne’s numbers is followed almost immediately by Scott’s guest appearance. What mere mortal could stand comparison to those two dynamos?

Crawl (2019)

There’s some great visual filmmaking here, and it's a lot of fun until the characters start talking. Fortunately, that's not often. Barry Pepper manages to invest most of his dialogue with some weight, but can we declare a moratorium on "I never thought it would end like this?" Listen, writers, nobody expects to end up in an alligator-infested basement during a category five hurricane. The only proper response would be, "Ya think?"

Cry Havoc (1943)

Five fabulous women: Joan Blondell (c.) and clockwise (from top left) Fay Bainter, Marsha Hunt, Margaret Sullavan and Ann Sothern

This World War II drama betrays its stage origins with too many scenes set in a dormitory for nursing volunteers serving in the Philippines, and it’s pure Hollywood flag waving. But the cast keeps things moving along. Margaret Sullavan is in charge of the women, and she has that wonderful voice to put a teardrop behind almost every line. Ann Sothern scores as the woman with a chip on her shoulder, Ella Raines is sympathetic as a society girl stuck in the Pacific, Connie Gilchrist is reliably sympathetic as their cook, but Joan Blondell gets the real acting honors as a stripper (“You know what you do to a banana before you eat it? Well, I do it to music.”). The camera follows her as she moves through the military hospital after an air raid, stopping to comfort a dying soldier before taking over a bandaging job. It’s a great bit of acting as she holds in her reactions to the horrors around her, building until her final breakdown.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)

John Malkovch gives Zac Efron an acting lesson. Whether or not it will take is anybody's guess.

They left out “a little boring.” This Netflix original can’t seem to make up its mind whether it's a Lifetime confessional (“If you think your man’s a serial killer, it’s time to put the brakes on the relationship”), a docudrama or an ironic take on Zac Efron’s image. It’s kind of sad watching him butt up against his limitations trying to play Ted Bundy (a role much better handled by Mark Harmon in 1986’s The Deliberate Stranger and Billy Campbell in Ann Rule: The Stranger Beside Me, a 2003 USA Network film). When the judge played by John Malkovich tells Efron that his becoming a killer was a horrible waste of human potential, you believe he believes it because he’s Malkovich, for goddess’ sake, but he seems a little delusional for all that. One can only hope Mr. Efron paid a lot of attention in the scenes Malkovich steals without breaking a sweat.

The Forbidden Room (2015)

Some of the world’s queerest movies come from Winnipeg and are directed by the straight Guy Maddin. Case in point, this strange assemblage of stories inspired by lost films and co-directed by Evan Johnson. At one point, you’re watching a flashback within a memoir within a fantasy within a dream within a story that’s also a dream within a story. It stars Maddin regulars like Louis Negin and Maria de Medeiros, along with Geraldine Chaplin as The Master Passion, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling and the very handsome Roy Dupuis as Cesare, the sapling jack.

Gilda (1946)

One of the screen's great triangles, but who's at the apex? George Macready, Rita Hayworth or Glenn Ford?

With a romantic triangle that goes both ways, this is one of the queerest movies of the 1940s. You can never quite tell, even at the end, if Glenn Ford is jealous that George Macready is married to Rita Hayworth or that Hayworth has stolen Macready. Harry Cohn put Hayworth in so much schlock that when she finally gets to work with a half-decent script it’s surprising how good she is. She brings the film a wit and energy that keeps it from becoming too sordid, and her dancing in two musical numbers, choreographed by Jack Cole, is a joy to watch.

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

I don’t know if a perfect comedy exists, but Preston Sturges’ last Paramount release comes pretty darn close. Eddie Bracken stars as a 4F who lets a group of Marines headed by William Demarest convince him to go back to his small town posing as a war hero (just to make his mother happy). As in all of Sturges’ films, the comic timing is impeccable, particularly in the scenes between Bracken and Demarest, and the supporting cast is terrific. Sturges’ physical staging is just as impressive, from the opening shot that tracks from a tap dancer in a nightclub to Bracken sitting alone at the bar to the number of parades dotting the film and the organized chaos of the crowd scenes. In one of his best roles, eternally nelly Franklin Pangborn is the town’s harried event planner.

I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993)

The complete film (with Spanish subtitles)

 

Sarah Jacobson’s short, shot in black-and-white 16mm, is an explosion of feminist punk anger as it follows a young woman (Kristin Calabrese) who starts killing the men who abuse her, from a casual rest-stop pickup (shades of Aileen Wuornos) to a man who poses as a fellow spirit only to reveal himself as misogynistic as her other victims. You can’t get very deep into a character like that in 27 minutes, but you sure can reveal a lot about the culture.

Intruder in the Dust (1949)

 Juano Hernandez domiantes the film but never made it to the cover of the video box.

It’s amazing to consider that MGM and one of Greta Garbo’s favorite directors turned out this searing indictment of racism in the South. There are many marvels in this William Faulkner adaptation: Juano Hernandez’ uncompromising performance as a proud black man in the rural South, the depiction of blacks as living in a hostile country, the terrifying scene in which young Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman, Jr.) exhumes a murder victim’s body and the even more terrifying scene of people gathering in anticipation of a lynching as if going to a county fair. Even more disturbing, the current DVD box, which inadvertently suggests things haven’t changed that much since 1949.

The Killers (1946)

 Two stars a-borning: Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster

With its themes of fate, betrayal and duplicity, this is one of the great film noirs. It’s actually structured like Citizen Kane (1941), with the story of Ole “Swede” Anderson (Burt Lancaster, in his film debut) told through a series of flashbacks by various characters. Lancaster does some pretty impressive work, especially in his first three scenes, in which he has to make a defeated character compelling. As the woman who leads him astray, Ava Gardner is pretty damned good, too (she was always rather underrated). The role made her a star, and you can see it happening in her first close-ups. The whole thing is expertly made, from Robert Siodmak’s direction and Woody Bredell’s cinematography to the polished, professional performances of actors like Edmond O’Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene and Jeff Corey. Miklos Rosza’s score includes the four-note figure that would serve as the theme for Dragnet.

A Kiss Before Dying (1956)

Less film noir than film beige, this tepid thriller follows a young psychopath (Robert Wagner) trying to kill his way into a wealthy family. When impregnating one child, Joanne Woodward (channeling Shelley Winters’ most pathetic moments in 1951’s A Place in the Sun), proves the wrong move, he tosses her off a roof and then starts courting her sister (Virginia Leith), who has too good a head on her shoulders to buy his line for long. Wagner’s idea of how to play a murderous madman is to chain smoke while barely moving his face. Let’s just say, he’s no Bruno Anthony. Mary Astor has a few nice moments as his mother, and George Macready has a great reaction shot when he realizes the man who’s about to marry one daughter may have killed the other. This was director Gerd Oswald’s first feature, but it displays little of the stylization that would mark lower-budget films like 1958’s Screaming Mimi or his The Outer Limits episodes. At least Wagner and co-star Jeffrey Hunter are pretty, but I couldn’t help giggling every time someone introduced Hunter’s character, who has the same name as a popular 1980s gay porn star, because, to be honest, adulthood is vastly overrated.

Ladies They Talk About (1933)

What a strange if often delightful film! Barbara Stanwyck is a gangster’s moll who helps set up a bank robbery. She’s caught, but an old friend turned preacher (Preston Foster) is about to get her off when she has a pang of conscience and confesses. That leads to a stay in women’s prison and the film’s best scenes. The inmates include Lillian Roth, who’s as lively and gritty as Stanwyck and even gets to sing, Madame Sul-Te-Wan as a sassy black woman named Mustard and the delightfully wacky Maude Eburne as a “beautician” whose parlor offered, shall we say, a different line of services. Ruth Donnelly is the assistant matron and in one scene walks around with a cockatoo on her shoulder, which somehow helps keep the inmates in line. There are also two jokes about a lesbian inmate who likes to wrestle and even seems to end up with a wrestling partner to call her own.

Libeled Lady (1936)

Pick your favorite: Myrna Loy, William Powell, Jean Harlow or Spencer Tracy.

 

The sheer expertise of this screwball comedy demonstrates what made the Golden Age of Hollywood so golden. The tight script features two squabbling couples brought together by a newspaper and a lawsuit. They wouldn’t be as likable played by other actors, but the four stars know just how to bring you into their characters’ lives. And Jack Conway’s direction keeps it all moving at a solid clip. You could do a personality test based on whether your favorite is Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, William Powell or Spencer Tracy. I vote for Loy, a master at injecting off-kilter line readings into her role as the sane one. The great supporting cast includes Walter Connolly, Charley Grapewin, Cora Witherspoon, George Chandler and, as a fishing instructor with a rather fluid wrist, E.E. Clive.

Light in the Piazza (1962)

Arthur Freed’s final film as producer is a decidedly mixed bag. Some elements seem dated in all the wrong ways — the travelogue shots of Italy, Mario Nascimbene’s score, which relentlessly Mickey Mouse’s the action, and the script that was thought daring at the time but now seems way too middle-of-the-road. In particular, screenwriters Elizabeth Spencer and Julius J. Epstein bend over three ways backwards to make Olivia de Havilland’s marriage to Barry Sullivan seem good, as if arguing over the care of a daughter with an intellectual disability were just a little bump in the road (and Sullivan’s assumption that he can just shove the girl into an institution seems monstrous today). I’m a big fan of the musical, and though I didn’t exactly miss the songs, I really wanted de Havilland to get to say “Love’s a fake,” one of her character’s most powerful lyrics, but the script tries to take a more conciliatory attitude. She’s good (as ever), particularly in the way she modulates her character’s change in attitude about her daughter’s romantic relationship. Her fight scenes with Barry Sullivan as her husband crackle, and she’s got great delicacy in her flirtation with Rossano Brazzi as the young man’s father. But the writers also force the character to talk to herself, and poor Olivia has no way of dealing with such phony writing, so she falls back on the testimonial tone she used to adopt in public appearances. The film’s big surprises are Yvette Mimieux as the daughter and George Hamilton as her suitor. I’ve rarely seen them so animated and believable.

Midnight (1939)

Mary Astor, John Barrymore, Don Ameche and Claudette Colbert.

In this champagne of screwball comedies, Claudette Colbert is a chorus girl stranded in Paris with only an evening gown and a pawn ticket (as one so often is). John Barrymore comes to the rescue as a nobleman who hires her to pose as a baroness and seduce his wife’s boyfriend. Mary Astor is the wife; Francis Lederer the boyfriend; and Don Ameche, looking amazingly sexy dressed all in black, is a taxi driver along for the ride. Even though he reads most of his lines off cue cards, Barrymore mugs so expertly he almost steals the film until Monty Woolley shows up as a divorce-court judge. Mitchell Leisen is best remembered as the Paramount director whose meddling drove Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges into the director’s chair. For that alone, we should thank him. He also had an unfailing flair for visuals (some of his actors’ compositions are worth freezing the frame for) and eliciting performances. With its disguisings, mockery of marriage and the presence of Woolley and Rex O’Malley, the film flirts with the queer (while Leisen’s 1944 Frenchman’s Creek marries it and bears it children).

My Name Is Julia Ross (1945)

One of the best of Hollywood's B movies combines gothic and noir in a twisted plot in which newly hired secretary Nina Foch goes to sleep in her employers' London townhouse and wakes up in a seaside estate with everybody telling her she's really George Macready's mentally unbalanced wife. Dame May Whitty is surprisingly nasty as MacReady's mother, and director Joseph H. Lewis pulls off some great shots. This was a B movie that looked (and sometimes was booked as) an A feature, but then, not every B movie had Burnett Guffey doing camerawork and Jean Louis designing the costumes. I'd love to see a drag remake, where an innocent young man wakes up as a woman.

Our Betters (1933)

Constance Bennett’s beauty usually overshadowed her acting, except when she worked for George Cukor, as she does here. In this pre-Code gem about American heiresses marrying English titles, she navigates Lady Pearl’s scandals as effectively as she handles her Hattie Carnegie fashions (you could do an essay on the impracticality of her high society duds in this film). Anita Louise and Charles Starrett are insufferable as the decent Americans who keep judging her, but Violet Kemble Cooper and Grant Mitchell are a lot of fun as her cronies. Mitchell’s Thornton Clay reads rather gay until Tyrell Davis shows up as Mr. Ernest, the dancing teacher, and sets the screen afire. It’s adapted from a Somerset Maugham play that was lots naughtier on stage.

The Phenix City Story (1955)

Although its 1950s depiction of depravity now seems almost quaint (the film opens with Meg Myles as a stripper who never takes off more than her gloves), Phil Karlson’s gritty film noir is still a pretty powerful condemnation of small-town depravity. It’s hard not to see the parallels to the U.S. today in this tale of how the good citizens of Phenix City (mainly father-and-son lawyers John McIntyre and Richard Kiley) take on local vice lords in Sin City, U.S.A. Of course, Donald Trump doesn’t have a fraction of the class Edward Arnold (in his feature debut) displays as the chief criminal, nor do we have a state governor to call on to help drain the swamp. Karlson shot the film while the story was unfolding and even turned up evidence that helped put some of the criminals behind bars. He also played a bit with the facts, inventing the murder of an African-American child to up the stakes and depicting Kiley’s character — future governor John Patterson, an ardent segregationist — as a friend to the city’s black community.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

One queer school outing.

Timing is everything. Had I seen Peter Weir’s historical drama when it first came out, my neo-Aristotelian aesthetic would have been frustrated by the mystery that’s never solved and a plot that jumps among different characters. Seeing it more recently, with a queer aesthetic, I found the mystery a reflection of the elusiveness of all meaning and was particularly intrigued by the sexually ambiguous relationships. The young Englishmen played by Dominic Guard discusses a group of schoolgirls with his valet (John Jarratt) as if they were sexual objects, but as the young men’s involvement in the case deepens, the relationship does as well, moving from master-servant to bromance with hints it goes beyond that. The film is beautiful to look at — like a French Impressionist painting — with a marvelous score and a particularly fine performance by Rachel Roberts as the proprietress of a women’s college from which three students and a teacher go missing. It’s all about absence: the missing women, the unstated passions, the invisibility of the aboriginal population (even though there’s a reference to a native tracker who’s part of the search efforts) and, if it’s not too much of a stretch, the lack of connection between the colonists  — shielded behind their Victorian architecture and clothing — and the dazzling natural world.

Primrose Path (1940)

The Production Code supposedly made RKO clean up Victoria Lincoln’s novel about a young woman (Ginger Rogers) breaking free of the family business, but you'd have to be pretty dim not to realize that mommy and grandma are prostitutes. Rogers is great in the comic scenes, but she's something of a humbug when things get sentimental. Fortunately, director Gregory La Cava doesn't let that go on too long. As Rogers' mother, Marjorie Rambeau is luminous, while Queenie Vassar, as the grandmother, now seems to be giving Leslie Jordan's best performance.

A Slight Case of Murder (1938)

I used to tell acting students the best lesson in how to play farce was watching Carolyn Jones (and later Anjelica Huston) in The Addams Family. No matter how outlandish things got around her, she played everything with a total seriousness that was funnier than most of the series’ more clownish performances. I can now add to the list Edward G. Robinson in this gangster comedy. He’s so earnest as a former bootlegger going legit after Prohibition’s repeal that as things fall apart, particularly with the discovery of four dead bodies in his summer rental, you can’t stop laughing. He’s helped a lot by the usual Warner Bros. stalwarts — Allen Jenkins, Edward Brophy and Harold Huber — plus Ruth Donnelly as his wife, desperately trying to elevate her diction and almost always failing, Billy Halop as the delinquent orphan he takes in for the summer and, very briefly, Margaret Hamilton as the head of the orphan’s home. Director Lloyd Bacon learned comic timing working with Charles Chaplin, though his greatest gift here seems to be knowing when to get out of the actors’ way.

So Dark the Night (1946)

Another of Burnett Guffey's great images.

In a rare leading role, character actor Steven Geray is a French police detective on vacation in a small town. When a series of murders occurs, he sets out to solve the case, despite his personal involvement. Director Joseph H. Lewis and cinematographer Burnett Guffey create some wonderful effects, starting with pristine black and white images before the murders and creating more and more disorienting effects as the mystery unfolds. If you read the camera work right, you’ll guess whodunnit. Oddly, everybody speaks with French accents and occasionally breaks into actual French, which may be a bigger mystery than the murders.

Some of My Best Friends Are… (1971)

Rue with a difference.

This film about Christmas Eve in a gay bar is a trip down the queer-baiting rabbit hole. It has all the cliches of early '70s filmmaking and all the retrograde attitudes of that era. The dramatic scenes are dated and offensive. Just when you think they can't get any more ludicrous, they go even further over the top. With the current revival of interest in effeminacy, the comedy fares much better and is even endearing. And the cast is like something you'd dream while sick: Rue McClanahan as a wealthy fag hag giving Faye Dunaway's best performance (the way she channels some of Dunaway’s more mannered later work is almost prescient) , Fannie Flagg as the coat check woman, Gary Sandy as a hustler who can't admit he's gay, Sylvia Sims as the bar's cook and den mother, Candy Darling as a drag queen who hasn't learned to tuck yet, Gil Gerard as a gay airline pilot and Carleton Carpenter, stealing almost every shot he's in (he doesn't really get any scenes) as one of the nelliest queens. It's funny, insulting and rarely less than totally engrossing.

They Drive by Night (1940)

Almost relentlessly entertaining, Raoul Walsh’s truck-driving drama is really two films in one — a hard-hitting look at the lives of independent truckers like the brothers played by George Raft and Humphrey Bogart and a proto-film noir with Ida Lupino murdering her husband (Alan Hale) to get a shot at Raft — and both are a lot of fun. The latter is a remake of Bordertown (1935), and it was a lot easier to believe Bette Davis killing Eugene Pallette for Paul Muni. Until her final mad scenes, which are a little too florid, Lupino matches Davis’ performance with a lot of help from costume designer Milo Anderson. Ann Sheridan is the leading lady, and her low-key, wise-cracking performance almost steals the film. Then again, I’m prejudiced. Sheridan and Lupino are two of the best actresses never to be nominated for Oscars (Sheridan should have been up for 1942’s Kings Row and Lupino for Ladies in Retirement in 1941 and The Hard Way in 1943).

Tomorrow the World! (1944)

You could subtitle this picture “How Not to Adapt a Play.” The stage version by James Gow and Armand d’Usseau was a thoughtful melodrama about the havoc wreaked when an orphaned Hitler Youth member is sent to live with his American relations, and Skip Homeier was praised for his performance as the child. To get the film short enough for double bills, the writers cut the nuance and kept the preaching. Even more nuance falls to make room for opening up the action to show Homeier interacting with good all-American kids. Then, nobody explained to him that he wasn’t playing to the second balcony any longer. Lard on a score that would be over-the-top behind East Lynne, and the serious social drama turns into an exercise in camp. It’s a rare film that makes Fredric March look stupid, but his falling for Homeier’s machinations while the young actor is rolling his eyes and twisting his face at every opportunity makes the older character (a research chemist working for the war effort) seem moronic. Betty Field, in her movie star mode, comes off best as March’s Jewish fiancée, though I prefer the gritty persona she projected in more realistic films like Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Southerner (1945).

What’s the Matter With Helen? (1971)

Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds queer Golden Age Hollywood.

It's a mistake to view this picture as a horror film. Director Curtis Harrington has done much more effective horrors like Night Tide (1961) and Games (1967). Rather, it's a very subversive film set in 1930s Hollywood and dealing with what the Golden Age movies left out, particularly queerness. Debbie Reynolds (always a much better actress than most credit) and a surprisingly subdued Shelley Winters are the mothers of Midwest thrill killers. They escape their notoriety by moving to L.A. to run a children's talent school. It's really all about Reynolds' search for normalcy and Winters' repressed lesbianism (things don't get crazy until Debbie falls in love with a man). In the middle of it all is an hilarious kiddie talent show, featuring 11-year-old Robbi Morgan doing a weirdly sexual Mae West imitation on "Oh, You Nasty Man!" while her mother (Helene Winston) mouths the song and mimes her gestures in the wings. The supporting cast includes Dennis Weaver, a very sexy Swen Swenson dancing with Reynolds and Yvette Vickers, whose life story would make a much more horrifying film than most of what passes as horror these days.