Small Wonders, Big Missteps

Carol Kane in THE DEAD DON’T DIE (they just get wasted)

When you cut the zombies in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die (2019), puffs of red dust explode from the wound. It’s a nifty effect that, sadly, stands as the film’s main addition to walking dead lore. For a movie that wears its affection for the genre on its sleeve, this deadpan spoof is sadly lacking in all the elements that make films like Night of the Living Dead (1968), Zombie (1979) and 28 Days Later (2002) such delirious delights.

The picture seems to be an arrangement of comedy sketches, using pauses and repetition for comic effect. That requires a great deal of discipline and control on the part of the performers. It’s a natural tendency to want to speed up to get laughs. But Jarmusch’s cast—including such solid comic actors as Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Steve Buscemi—keeps the pace down through the funnier bits, so the film starts off well.

The plot involves the reanimation of the dead after a series of fracking exercises at the North and South Poles—the kind of crazy causality you find in everything from Night of the Living Dead to Return of the Dead (1985). Before long, corpses are popping out of graves and rising from slabs at the local mortuary. As in Dawn of the Dead (1978), in addition to eating the living, they're preoccupied with their main interests in life. That's a joke with a rather short shelf life. Once you've seen them going for coffee or nicotine or booze, the bit doesn't go anywhere. Jarmusch has also cast a few name performers as zombies, and it seems rather a waste to put Carol King into a film where all she does is say "Chardonnay" before being dispatched.

But then, after the first few scenes establishing the film's comic rhythms, Jarmusch doesn't make particularly good use of anybody in the cast.  Tilda Swinton, who usually can steal a film with the lift of an eyebrow, appears as the town's new mortician, a mysterious Scot who carries a katana. She's great at offing zombies, but she's been given next to nothing to work with. Bits like repeatedly addressing everybody by their full names just don't go anywhere.

At least her character gets something of an arc. Others, like a group of teens headed by Selena Gomez, get lost in the parade of shambling corpses. The kids arrive in the same type of car driven by Johnny and Barbara in Night of the Living Dead, and everybody thinks they're from Pittsburgh (where George Romero's film was shot). Then they vanish until they turn up dead with no explanation. A trio of youngsters in a home for delinquent youth (and we never learn why they're there; there's hardly anything delinquent about them) run off to hide, and that's the last we see of them.

By that time, the film has worn out its welcome. The final scenes are almost an anthology of all the stupid things people do in horror movies -- locking themselves up in buildings and forgetting to secure the back door; driving into the cemetery from which the dead are rising, etc, At that point, the deliberate pace that was funny in earlier scenes, when nobody can figure out what's going on, works against the film. The improbabilities move the film into the realm of farce, which needs to move quickly so you don't have time to question all the craziness going on. The picture dies on the vine, its conclusion met with a collective "Huh?" (that's not exaggeration; I actually heard that from several seats while I was watching the film). It’s almost as if the film were made by the living dead, which makes it a rather typical Hollywood production.

 

An animated Steve Carell and his surprisingly hot shoulders in WELCOME TO MARWEN

The computer-animated scenes in Robert Zemcikis' Welcome to Marwen (2018) are a subversive treat. They’re inspired by a true story. After a hate-inspired attack left artist Mark Hogencamp unable to draw, he turned his home into an artistic installation, a miniature World War II Belgian village called Marwencol (reduced to Marwen for most of the movie). He filled it with dolls he transformed into a female fighting force lead by a U.S. military captain. Since the attack was triggered by Hogencamp's drunken revelation that he liked to wear women's shoes, the captain wears high heels while fighting Nazis, a queer image if ever there was one.

In Zemickis' film these images come to life, with motion-capture technology turning Steve Carell, Merritt Weaver, Janelle Monae, Gwendoline Brooks and others into the stars of a computer-animated war film. The figures have the stiff-legged gait of dolls, and when Carel's Cap'n Hogie takes his shirt off, it reveals the shoulder armature, which is oddly sexy. Best of all is a scene in which he not only wears heels while fighting the enemy but also uses them as weapons. As long as the animated scenes dominate the action, the picture is liberatingly subversive, dismantling essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity.

Unfortunately, Welcome to Marwen is not an entirely animated film. After the first war scene, in which Cap'n Hogie's female protectors save him from a Nazi squad, the picture transitions into live action. It follows Hogencamp (Carell) as he deals with memory loss and PTSD and tries to work up the courage to deliver a victim-impact statement at the trial of his assailants and attend a gallery opening for his photos of Marwen. Were these scenes treated in a realistic manner, they'd provide a fascinating counterpoint to the animated fantasy. But they're not. Rather, they're a throwback to the romanticism of Hollywood at its height. The plot materials are contemporary, but the treatment is glossy and artificial.

You can't blame the actors for this. They're doing what the script requires of them. Carel, whose first successes were in the American version of The Office and a series of surprisingly intelligent sex comedies, immerses himself in Hogencamp's emotional state. He doesn't rely on any of his comic tricks to wink at the audience and reassure them he's not really as tortured or eccentric as the character seems. Then again, he doesn't have to. The film keeps doing that for him.

For some reason, Zemeckis and Caroline Thompson's script creates a love interest for Hogencamp (the real Hogencamp has had no romantic involvements since his attack). Leslie Mann plays Nicol, a woman who's just moved across the street. As his fascination with her grows, Hogencamp even adds her character to the Marwen installation and changes its name to Marwencol. Mann is a perfectly capable actress, but she's saddled with a barely defined role. Nicol is some kind of eternal innocent, a figure right out of Victorian literature and Golden Age Hollywood. She works with sick animals, and though she's trying to get away from an abusive ex-boyfriend, his mistreatment doesn’t seem to have affected her character. She's just an inexplicable ray of sunshine, a male dream of what a good woman should be.

She's not the only actress consigned to some kind of dreamlike role. All of the women in Marwen are reflections of the women in Hogencamp's life, and they have a lot to do in the animated sequences. Except for Buttrick, who plays a faithful friend nursing a crush on Carel, however, they have precious little to do in the real world scenes. Christie, the wonderful Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones, has one scene as Hogencamp's Russian-born caregiver. It's basically a series of dialect jokes, and she pulls them off well, but you know she could contribute a lot more to the film if given a chance. Monae, the unsung heroine of Hidden Figures and Moonlight (both 2016), has even less to do, a brief flashback as a fellow physical therapy patient encouraging Hogencamp to walk.

After a while, it becomes clear that the live-action scenes are undermining everything that's wonderful about the animated sequences. Whenever Cap'n Hogie gets close to a woman in Marwen, he's thwarted by Deja Thoris, the witch of Marwen, who has no real-world equivalent in Hogencamp's life. As the plot develops, she seems to represent some emotional conflict the artist can't acknowledge. Could it be some latent sexual issue that prevents his becoming truly intimate with women? Who knows? In the end it's hard to tell why she's in the picture except to generate conflict.

That muddy bit of symbolism, coupled with the real-life scenes' failure to fully embody the female characters, makes the picture seem to be rejecting all the tantalizing queerness of the animated scenes. We're constantly reassured that there's nothing really different about Hogencamp. Sure, he likes to wear women's shoes, but he can still fall for a beautiful dream girl, and it's all going to come out fine when he learns to believe in himself. If he's a little eccentric, well, what can you expect from an artist.  It's the kind of thinking you’d expect from a Steven Spielberg adaptation of Glen or Glenda (1953).

Ayn Ruymen navigates corridors of kink in PRIVATE PARTS.

By contrast, an older film, Paul Bartel's debut feature Private Parts (1972), is a minor miracle. The film doesn't set out to achieve anything earth shattering. It's just trying to unsettle us a bit with its combination of horror film tropes and sexual perversity. But it accomplishes that with style. Young, not-so-innocent Cheryl (Ayn Ruymen) has robbed her parents to escape Ohio for the joys of the West Coast. After a falling out with her best friend (Ann Gibbs), she tracks down her aunt (Lucille Benson), who runs a seedy hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The aunt takes her in on condition that Cheryl not go exploring.

Naturally as soon as the aunt has left (she likes to attend funerals for people she doesn't know), Cheryl goes looking for trouble, turning up kinks in the hotel that overshadow her petty larceny. There's an old lady (Roger Corman regular Dorothy Neumann) who wanders the halls cleaning her false teeth and looking for Alice, a tenant who seems to have vanished (three guesses what happened to her; first two don't count). The Reverend Moon (Laurie Main) has a swarthy young handyman come to his room on a regular basis and later turns up in full leather regalia. Most mysterious is George (John Ventantonio), a reclusive photographer who spies on Cheryl when she bathes, sells pictures of couples he catches making out in the park and sleeps with an inflatable doll filled with water and some of his blood.

This would all degenerate into just so much smarm were it not done with a high level of skill. Bartel and cinematographer Andrew Davis create a strong sense of atmosphere, shooting on location at Los Angeles' King Edward Hotel. As Cheryl roams the halls and discovers strange, secluded rooms, the place becomes another character in the film. It's almost as if the ramshackle building were driving its denizen's crazy.

There's also a lot of good work from the cast. Benson, who seems to have been born old and eccentric, has one of those wonderful Southern accents that renders everything she says faintly absurd. She keeps adding extra syllables to words, drawing them out in a way that almost deprives them of meaning. Her presence makes Aunt Martha's preachments on the importance of traditional values feel hollow. They’re less family values than just another form of decadence.

Ruymen, who seems to have vanished from the business sometime in the 1990s, was one of the hot young actresses of her day. She held her own opposite Maureen Stapleton on stage in Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady and on TV in the early feminist movie-of-the-week Tell Me Where It Hurts (1974). Here she's a demented Alice down the rabbit hole.  She does a skillful job of limning her character's gradual seduction by the hotel's world. She has a particularly fine scene when she's out on a date with a normal boy (played by Barry Livingtone, taking a break from his decade-plus wallow in the mediocrity of My Three Sons). She can't let go of what she's seen at the hotel and eventually walks out on him in pursuit of more dangerous pastimes.

The film isn't completely flawless. Gibbs has been directed to play the former roommate on a single shrill note; it's a relief when she disappears into the hotel's basement. Hugo Friedhofer's wall-to-wall score is very much of its period, but now seems one of the film's most dated elements as he Mickey Mouses everything the characters are going through. And the ending is the kind of self-conscious dark moment you should have stopped finding deep and meaningful by the time you graduated high school. Until then, however, the film is a pretty delicious walk on the wild side, a celebration of the queer little kinks people try in vain to hide behind closed doors.

Landscapes of Horror

Tilda Swinton, perfectly cast as a dancer-choreographer, leads her troupe to hell in a g-string in Suspiria.

Luca Guadagnino sets his remake of Suspiria (2018) in a wintry world. Almost until the end, the palette is dominated by cool colors and muted pastels. It's a powerful contrast to the passions lurking beneath the surface in this tale of a dance company that's actually a front for a coven of witches. The women running the school glide through Berlin, with occasional outbursts of laughter, some of it sororal, some of it taunting, particularly when dealing with dancers who can't get with the program or men who, in their view, can't get with anything. The major burst of color is leading lady Dakota Johnson's red hair, which is a bit of foreshadowing.

At the center of all this is the relationship between choreographer Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) and new dancer Susie (Johnson). Johnson is a fantasy figure out of Fame (1982) or Flashdance (1983) — an untrained dancer who's all explosive instincts. It's a conceit that plays well with slackers, like the musical numbers that come together out of nowhere on Glee. You can sit and watch while telling yourself that you could do just as well if you wanted to. Fortunately, Johnson has enough energy and openness to pull it off. Guadagnino shoots most of the dances like music videos, so his percussive editing convinces you that she's a better dancer than she is. The result is a performance that pulls you in. Despite the tired trope, you find yourself caring about this young woman. That's important since the main tension in the plot is the growing awareness that the coven has chosen her as a sacrifice to restore the vitality of their ancient leader, Mother Markos (also Swinton).

In the 33 years since she made her film debut in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio (1986), Swinton has established herself as one of the most powerful presences on film. Playing four roles in Suspiria (or rather, three and a half, since one is barely defined) she shows that there's a lot of skill backing up that presence. As Madame Blanc, she effortlessly dominates a dance company run by eccentric types. She doesn't overstate anything. You can tell from her eyes and the set of her body that she sees something of herself in Susie, which helps get across the film's central conflict — the battle between factions of the coven over Susie's fate — without pounding the audience over the head. Even more impressive is her work as Dr. Klemperer, a male psychiatrist who's been treating a young dancer who sees through the dance company's façade. She doesn't just rely on the makeup (which is very good) to put the character across. She moves with the considered delicacy of the very old and speaks with a slight rasp. It takes a moment to recognize the voice as hers, and you can only spot the physical resemblance when she's in profile.

Guadagnino wanted Swinton to play the male psychoanalyst to reinforce the film's heavy focus on women. Apart from two police detectives who have only a few scenes, all of the major players are women. This helps clarify the film's central conflict, the battle between destructive and nurturing approaches to power. As the film starts, the coven has just elected Mother Markos as leader over Madame Blanc. The Markos faction views Susie as a sacrifice and urges Madame Blanc to get her ready quickly. Blanc wants to hold off the sacrifice to see Susie's full potential. This echoes the political turmoil of Germany in 1977. News reports about the Baader-Meinhof Group's hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 play in the background of several scenes. Klemperer is haunted by the loss of his wife when they attempted to flee the Third Reich near the end of World War II. This historical perspective underlines the film's focus on the abuse of power. It will take a cataclysm to wrest power from the patriarchal forces that traditionally hold it, and that's what the film moves toward at the end.

I must admit that I am not a fan of Dario Argento's original Suspiria (1977). I've given the film numerous viewings, trying to find something to justify the high esteem in which others hold it, but I just don't get it. There are other films of his I love — The Bird with Crystal Plumage (1970), Deep Red (1975), Opera (1987), the "Black Cat" segment of Two Evil Eyes (1990), Mother of Tears (2007) and particularly Phenomena (1985). In his best work, there's a kind of delirium that defies logic. They're like being caught in a fever dream that won't let you wake up. For me, his Suspiria starts high and has nowhere to go. You can't exactly build on the super-saturated colors or the gruesome murder of Patricia, the young dancer who attempts to escape the company at the film's start. Nor is there any real sense of environment. The film's set in a dance academy where nobody ever seems to dance, and it's next to impossible to imagine Joan Bennett's Madame Blanc was ever a dancer. She's just a stately set piece, used more for her association with Dark Shadows than anything she might contribute as an actress.

By contrast, Gaudagnino's Suspiria is all about dance. Swinton moves with a dancer's grace. The one truly gruesome scene in the film's first part is the torture of Olga (Elena Fokina), another rebellious dancer who tries to leave the company. Some unseen force pulls her into a mirrored rehearsal room she can't escape. As Susie takes over her leading role in the company's signature piece, Guadagnino cuts so that Susie’s moves seem to be twisting Olga's body until she's left a quivering ball of pain. It's a great, upsetting scene that maintains the picture's identity as a horror film and keeps you viewing as Guadagnino moves through the plot and intensifies his themes.

It's not all smooth sailing. Guadagnino sometimes thinks too much like a novelist rather than a director. The film is divided into six acts and an epilogue, with each segment announced by a cryptic title. Only the story doesn't really break conveniently into six parts. And the titles are rather a distraction, particularly in the epilogue, which is called "A Sliced-Up Pear." If you look closely, you can find the pear on a character's breakfast tray, but what exactly is that supposed to mean? There also are strange cut-ins of a farm-house somewhere that aren't properly contextualized until more than halfway through the film (it's the Mennonite family Susie left to join the dance company). It just seems to be getting in the way of the rest of the narrative until Guadagnino finally uses it to drop a kernel of information. It's also a little disconcerting that though the dance in the film is inspired by the work of female choreographers like Pina Bausch (who was the model for Swinton's Madame Blanc) and Mary Wigman, the film's admittedly effective choreography is the work of a man, Damien Jalet. Were all the female choreographers in Europe sick or busy when they were putting the film together or could only a man explain feminist dance to the audience?

For all that, the film still has a powerful effect. Guadignino has filled the picture with strong female presences, most notably Chloe Grace Moritz as the first student to rebel, Angela Winkler, Alek Wek, Renee Soutendijk and, from the first film, Jessica Harper. There's a sense of dread that builds persuasively, and the finale effectively ties together Guadagnino's ideas. It certainly deserved a better fate at the box office. Hopefully, it will make up for that in ancillary markets, where the slackers who can believe an untrained dancer could end up as good as Susie will be more likely to see it.

Zohra Lampert serves up exquisite horror in Let's Scare Jessica to Death.

Director John Hancock and cinematographer Robert M. Baldwin turn the beauties of the Connecticut countryside into a nightmare world in their independent horror film Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971). It's the kind of trick — finding horror in the everyday —Alfred Hitchcock honed to perfection. With its subtle questioning of reality, however, the film is closer to the literate, low budget psychological horror films Val Lewton produced at RKO in the 1940s.

Jessica (Zohra Lampert) has recently been released from a mental hospital. To help with her recovery, her husband (Barton Heyman) has left his position as a symphony bassist and sunk all of their savings into an isolated Connecticut farm. Before they even arrive, Jessica starts seeing strange things, but she can't tell if they're real or mark the return of her mental problems. When she finally does share what's she's seen, Heyman’s not sure he can believe her because of her past. Nor is her mood helped by the hostility of the locals, who view them as invading hippies. Eventually, she comes to believe a young woman (Mariclare Costello) whom they take in after finding her squatting in the farmhouse is a vampire who has taken control of all the men around her.

Hancock pulls off a terrific balancing act. You're never sure if what you're seeing is real or Jessica's delusions. Even when we see things she couldn't see, as when an antique dealer they've befriended is haunted by a strange underwater figure or Costello seduces Heyman, there's the suspicion that we're just seeing more of her fantasies. By the end, when Jessica has either succumbed to madness or seen her world destroyed by the vampire, we're left wondering, like her, "Dreams or nightmares? Madness or sanity? I don't know which is which."

Let's Scare Jessica To Death was made just as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its imitators were bringing the commodification of gore to the horror genre. With its low budget and disreputable genre, it wasn't taken very seriously on its initial release, though it has achieved some measured status as a cult film and is highly respected by filmmakers. Were a film of comparable quality made today, it could easily be in line for major awards consideration, something that would have been unheard of in 1971. Of course, if it were made today, it would be missing its best element, Lampert.

Lampert's Jessica isn't just one of the most fully rounded characters in the horror genre. Her performance is one of the best you're going to find anywhere. From her first scene, when she almost dances with delight as her husband stops their hearse (it's the cheapest vehicle they could find) at a rural cemetery so she can make a headstone tracing, she has the character down to the smallest gesture. Jessica is brimming with a childlike energy and openness that leaves her vulnerable to everything happening around her, and Lampert registers all of it in her face and body. Throughout the film, we hear her thoughts on the soundtrack. It's a tricky device that could sink a less talented actor. If you've ever suffered through the film version of Strange Interlude (1932), you know just how bad a bad voiceover can be, like the worst radio drama played over actors mugging painfully. But Lampert delivers her stream-of-consciousness monologues simply, trusting herself and the audience to follow the character's inner life at the speed of thought. It's an intelligent, deeply empathic performance that makes the film unforgettable.

The whole picture reeks of that kind of intelligence. This isn't the anything-for-an-effect world of Poltergeist (1982), where magic and the supernatural are used as an excuse for lack of logic. Hancock and screenwriter Lee Kalcheim have created a very specific type of vampire and don’t need to spell it out for the audience. Like good playwrights, they leave all the clues for the audience to assemble. These vampires are day walkers, and you can recognize them by the scars the original bloodsucker leaves on her victims. It isn’t long before the mere sight of a healed wound on someone is enough to send a chill through the audience. It’s reminiscent of the way Val Lewton’s directors (Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise and Mark Robson) could use a well-placed shadow or a simple sound effect to send audiences round the bend without upstaging the underlying Stoicism of the films. In the same way, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is certainly frightening enough, but its real goal isn’t just cheap scares. It’s aimed more at creating an overwhelming sense of dread about a world that can never be completely known. Dreams or nightmares? Madness or sanity? What does it matter when you’re poor Jessica caught up in the moment?

Burning and Boles

Ah-in Yoo, Jong-seo Jun and Stephen Yeun contemplate a landscape they could never equal in Burning.

There is a particularly exquisite moment in Chang-dong Lee’s Korean drama Burning (2018). The leading lady (Jong-seo Jun) gets stoned with the two men she’s been dating and starts dancing. As she dances, her hands slowly move up, reflecting a story she had told earlier about African Bushmen who dance to express their hunger. When they dance with their arms down, they’re dancing about physical hunger. When their hands move up, however, it’s about a more philosophical hunger, the desire to find some kind of meaning in life. As she dances, she removes her top, but the scene is backlit, so it’s more about her abandoning herself to some existential need than any kind of exhibitionism. Eventually, she dissolves into tears, and the camera moves away from her to linger on the countryside and the sky. Her great hunger is left unassuaged, and at that moment she and the film’s other characters seem inadequate to the world around them. Despite some beautiful images and good acting moments, the film itself feels in some ways inadequate as well. It’s not that it’s incapable of answering the big questions. What film ever is? It’s that it doesn’t seem to raise them very well.

For it’s first half hour, Burning seems to be a film about detachment. Lee Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) is an aspiring writer who rarely writes. Instead he works part time making deliveries and takes care of the family’s dying dairy farm. He renews an acquaintance with Shin Hae-mi (Jun), whom he knew as a child, and they start a casual affair. When she goes off on vacation in Africa, he cares for her cat. For half an hour, we watch him drift through his life, seemingly disconnected from all around him except the one calf left on the farm. When he makes love to Hae-mi, he hardly looks at her, only staring out the window. Later, while cat-sitting, he masturbates looking out the window at the same view. Like Lee, the filmmaking here is detached. We follow him through his routine with little commentary. It’s all objective, cold and a little dull.

When Hae-mi returns from Africa, she brings along a friend she made while stuck in the airport. Ben (Stephen Yeun) brings a new energy to the film. He’s well off, but the source of his money is never explained. Lee describes him as a “Gatsby” character, and for a while the film seems to veer into the world of social comedy. There’s an interesting contrast between Yeun’s slick coolness and the workaday worlds of Lee and Hae-mi that’s underlined when he invites them out with his friends. As Hae-mi demonstrates the dancing of the African Bushmen, they look on indulgently. Yeun even exchanges a mocking glance with Lee. It’s as if she were a pet the with-it kids had picked up somewhere — a source of humor and a reinforcement of their delusions of coolness.

Then the film takes a darker turn. After a visit to Lee’s farm, where Hae-mi repeats her dance, she disappears, and Lee begins to suspect that Ben has killed her. Now the film seems to have become a thriller, only it doesn’t have the suspense of a Hitchcock film. It’s closer to the mysteries in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and Blow-Up (1966), but without the sense of drive. Lee investigates Hae-mi’s disappearance with the same detachment he’s shown throughout the movie. Even when he starts stalking Ben, there’s something cold and removed about it, as if his concern for Hae-mi’s fate were more intellectual curiosity than actual love. Where Antonioni informed the mysteries in his films with a sense of obsession, Chang-dong Lee’s mystery seems more a question of duty, as if the director has to play out the tropes without taking any relish in them. At times, you may wish you were watching the decidedly shorter and zippier Strangers on a Train (1951) or Frenzy (1972).

Lee’s lack of connection to anything, including his search for Hae-mi, begins to suggest the film isn’t really about that relationship at all, but rather an extended courtship between Lee and Ben. In their first scenes together, Ben seems to be trying to seduce Lee in some way — whether to win his approval or get him into bed is anybody’s guess. In essence, the film’s central triangle is more homosocial than erotic. In fact, one could argue that Hae-mi is superfluous to the developing relationship between Lee and Ben. She’s only there as butch assurance, so the men’s relationship can be excused as a romantic rivalry rather than what it truly is, a courtship dance. After a while, you may question whether Lee is stalking Ben to find out what happened to Hae-mi or to find a way into his life.

Near the film’s end, Lee is caught keeping watch outside Ben’s apartment building. Instead of protesting, however, Ben invites him to a party he’s giving for the same friends Lee had met earlier. While in the apartment, Lee discovers a watch he had given Hae-me in a bathroom drawer filled with female jewelry. He also learns that Ben now has a cat. Ben hasn’t named it, but when Lee calls out for Burn, the name of Hae-mi’s cat, it comes to him. At the party, Ben’s new girlfriend, a salesgirl, does a lengthy imitation of the different ways people give her money. It’s an echo of Hae-mi’s dance for Ben’s friends earlier, including the mocking look Ben shares with Lee.. At that point, Lee leaves, but is he leaving because he thinks Ben is a serial killer or because he doesn’t want to become his next pet?

In a film more committed to its thriller conventions, this could be an intriguing mystery. In Burning, however, it just feels like a big muddle and a dismissal of Hae-mi’s individuality as a character. How can we blame Lee for his lack of investment in their relationship if the film doesn’t even invest in her. This is even more regrettable in light of Jun’s performance. She’s amazingly accomplished for an actress on her first professional job. When she meets Lee to show him her apartment, her walk is a perfect embodiment of the character — a wannabe party girl who knows that half the time she’s faking it but can’t stop herself. At times, she seems to get the character bettern than do the filmmakers. The film’s dismissal of her seems cruel and drags down the narrative.

Yoo suffers even more at the filmmakers’ hands. He’s made so detached that you may wonder if he’s even an actor (he is). He only has one scene in which he actually gets to connect, when talks about his mother’s leaving her family to escape his father’s violence and the night they burned her clothes because she was out of their lives. At that moment, you can see what a good performance Yoo could have given had the director let him.

The only actor who survives the film’s sense of detachment is Yeun. He’s fortunate in that he gets to play the character with the most energy. Whether he’s a serial killer or just a serial seducer, Ben thoroughly enjoys what he’s doing, and Yeun captures that. He’s really not romantic enough to be a Gatsby. He’s more like Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) or, if you buy him as a killer, Bruno in Strangers on a Train. Yeun has the casual good looks to pull it off (hell, his ability to maintain his looks as one of the hottest guys on The Walking Dead was almost a testament to human endurance), and there’s a sense of joy in his work that makes Ben a very convincing character. It’s a pity the film rarely rises to his or the other actors’ level.

Rhaposdy in … Green?

I recently caught up with a night of John Boles films on TCM. I’ve already written here about Craig’s Wife (see “Good and Bad Housekeeping”), but wanted to share my thoughts on three of the other pictures.

I wonder why they kicked the evening off with The King of Jazz (1930). It’s not just that Boles only turns up for only two musical numbers (he started out as a singer). It’s that his presence isn’t the real story here. The film has been out of circulation for years because of music rights and a badly decayed print. The recent restoration is a sight to behold, particularly the Technicolor Walter Lantz cartoon that opens the film. Color wasn’t enough to sell the picture to the public, however, and it’s considered the film that ended the first cycle of big-screen musicals. That’s easy to understand. Like The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Show of Shows (both 1929), it has no plot, just a string of musical numbers and comic sketches of varying qualities, in this case built around the popularity of big band leader Paul Whiteman. The dance numbers are pretty static; they cry out for a Busby Berkeley or Fred Astaire to get the camera involved. The early sound equipment makes Jeanette Loff’s soprano voice almost achingly shrill. The sketches are desperately unfunny. For contemporary audiences, the film’s real star is Bing Crosby, who was part of the Rhythm Boys back then. His singing is light, almost improvisational and a lot of fun. You can see how he became a big star within a few years.

The film’s centerpiece, however, is George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” By 1929, Gershwin had become dissatisfied with Whiteman’s interpretation of the piece. Its rendition in this film probably made his head explode. It opens with an extensive drum solo Gershwin never wrote danced by Jacques Cartier, a white dancer dressed in pseudo African attire and a black rubber suit that’s a full body version of black face. Those few minutes could probably fuel a dissertation on cultural appropriation. When the Gershwin music starts, Cartier is back in a green tux, miming playing the clarinet to the solo that opens the piece. And he keeps playing the clarinet, even as other instruments take over. There are some bad cuts in the music, the dancers are often out of time and because blue didn’t photograph well in two-strip Technicolor, it’s all done up in shades of green. Yet the squence creates its own warped reality, particularly when a grand piano opens to reveal the Whiteman orchestra inside. It’s like a pops concert on acid.

Douglass Montgomery is putty in the hands of Gloria Swanson and John Boles in Music in the Air.

At least Boles has a starring role in Music in the Air (1934), an adaptation of the hit Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical. In true Hollywood fashion, the film leaves out the show’s biggest hit, “The Song Is You,” though the number is performed under the opening titles. Boles and Gloria Swanson, in her last film for seven year, are a battling stage couple. Boles handles the material pretty well and shows a real flair for musical satire when he re-creates the finale of operetta he’s writing. Swanson sings beautifully, but her acting is too over-the-top for what’s supposed to be sophisticated material. She may not have had a dead body floating in her swimming pool, but it’s clear from this that there was more of Norma Desmond in Swanson than she ever wanted to admit.

The plot hinges on Boles and Swanson’s using a pair of young innocents — a small-town songwriter and his sweetheart — to get at each other. The girl, June Travis, plays the role as well as anybody could, but she’s been dubbed by another of those headache-inducing, shrill sopranos, and by 1934 you can’t blame that on the sound equipment. The boy, however, is a breath of fresh air. Douglass Montgomery was a real looker who should have had a better career (being gay off-screen may have held him back). He’s a very convincing and attractive young innocent, and he’s dubbed by a baritone who’s very easy on the ears.

There are two curious footnotes on the film. One of the writers is Billy Wilder, and the background music was written by Franx Waxman, both of whom would reunite with Swanson for the much more successful Sunset Boulevard (1950). In a bit part with no lines, Marjorie Main plays Swanson’s longsuffering maid. While Swanson’s busy chewing scenery, Main walks off with every scene she’s in by virtue of simplicity and commitment.

If Lionel Atwill, Julie Haydon, Irene Dunne and John Boles don’t watch out

Helen Westley will steal The Age of Innocence from them.

Before Martin Scorsese’s justly celebrated 1993 version of Edith Wharton’s novel, Hollywood had tackled The Age of Innocence twice before. I don’t know anybody who’s seen the silent version from 1924, but the RKO rendition from 1934 finished off TCM’s tribute to Boles. It’s a strange business, lacking the opulence and passion of Scorsese’s film. This version is adapted from a stage dramatization of the novel, so it’s talky and visually static. It’s also missing a lot of the novel’s subplots and minor characters. It hits all the thematic points about American and European values in conflict, but at 90 minutes, it’s pretty bare bones.

As Newland Archer, the young attorney torn between his duty to fiancée May Welland (Julie Haydon) and his passion for the married Countess Olenska (Irene Dunne), Boles is uncharacteristically stiff, as though the 19^th century costumes were squeezing the life out of him. Dunne seems like a comedienne waiting to happen. She only comes to life when the Countess has a playful moment or two. I suppose she deserves some kind of credit for spitting out the clunky dialogue without laughing or puking. When Boles suggests they go somewhere they can be free, she says:

Where is that place? Has anyone ever been there? Because I know so many who have tried to find it. And, believe me, they all got out by mistake, at some wayside station, like Dieppe or Pisa or Monte Carlo. It wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left. Only, smaller and dingier and more promiscuous. You see, over there, we think it’s over here. And over here we thing it’s over there. But, now I know it isn’t anywhere.

Actors have gone on suspension to avoid better dialogue than that.

With the stars hamstrung by bad writing, you have to look to the supporting cast for any joy.  Haydon doesn’t get a lot to do as May (at least in the remake Winona Ryder got to play the character’s more manipulative scenes on-screen), but there’s one look of death she shoots at Boles near the film’s end that points to the better work she would do in The Scoundrel (1935) and on stage (she was the original Laura in The Glass Menagerie). Laura Hope Crews is her delightfully daffy self as May’s mother, and Lionel Atwill is fun as a society bon vivant who would be a coded gay man if the script didn’t give him designs on Dunne. Best of all is Helen Westley, a stage veteran probably best remembered by film audiences as Shirley Temple’s aunt in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938). She’s an inveterate scene–stealer, and casting her as Dunne and Haydon’s eccentric grandmother is a gift to the audience. Maybe TCM should build an evening around her work.

Good and Bad Housekeeping

The invisible Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) looks after the family in Alfonso Cuarón's sublime Roma.

The opening titles of Alfonso Cuarón's Roma (2018) play out over a long shot of paving stones as water flows over them and reflects the sky and a plane passing overhead. The film's final shot looks upwards toward the outbuildings of what we've learned is a middle class home, this time showing the sky more directly as the family's Native maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), carries their laundry to the rooftop washing area. It's a simple shot of almost overpowering intensity within the context of what Cuarón has depicted during the past two hours and 15 minutes. During that time, we find that Cleo is the real backbone of the family. She may be just "the help," and, as such, virtually invisible at times, but she keeps the family running, even during times of crisis.

Like many great realistic works, and Roma most definitely is one of the great films, the picture sheds life on the marginalized. Cleo, a character inspired by Liboria Rodriguez, the maid who helped raise Cuarón, is one of the many often overlooked people who keep the worlds of middle and upper class Mexicans running smoothly. In the firm's first scene, a beautifully framed long shot of the house's upper level, she moves silently through the bedrooms, making beds and gathering dirty clothing. The scene quickly establishes her importance to the family. Their story would be the subject of any number of popular dramas or telenovelas. The restless father (Fernando Gradiaga), a well-off doctor, moves off to be with his mistress, leaving his wife (Marina de Tavira) to pick up the pieces. But the film focuses instead on the maids who quietly get them through the crisis. The marital break-up is important primarily as it affects Cleo's life. The husband's leaving leads his wife to take her hurt and anger out on Cleo in a brief outburst. While the family is off celebrating Christmas, the maid witnesses a married friend coming on to the now deserted de Tavira. She's with the children when their mother explains that their father has left and shares their shock when they return from a vacation to a house from which the husband has removed his belongings.

Yet Cuarón also gives the film a dreamlike atmosphere. The long takes, often with the camera following Cleo as she moves through her world, create an otherworldly rhythm. It's as if the camera were exploring an alien landscape made up of familiar objects. Cuarón also has a knack for incorporating elements of the environment that seem strangely out of place, like a trio of crosses set up along the road or a man dressed as a pagan forest creature for a holiday party who joins in when the guests go out to fight a forest fire as if this were the way anybody would dress to douse the flames. When Cleo's trip to buy a crib for her unborn baby coincides with 1971's Corpus Christi Massacre, a student uprising attacked by CIA-trained soldiers and right-wing guerillas, it all seems part of some strange nightmare in which the character is caught.

For all its stylistic bravado, however, Roma's greatest strength lies in Cuarón's ability to capture character in all its contexts — psychological, social, environmental — often in a single image. Gradiaga is introduced as he tries to park his car in the home's narrow driveway. Cuarón first shows his hands as he smokes a cigarette, the ashes going wherever they will. That one shot perfectly sums up his careless attitude toward the world around him, creating an impression only reinforced when he leaves his family without making arrangements for their financial support. As a more complex character, Cleo is captured in a series of images — the impassive stoicism with which she goes about her duties, the wry smile on her face as she watches her macho lover (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) show off in a hotel room where they've just made love, the childlike quality she captures while playing with one of the children in the rooftop laundry area and the pain when her pregnancy doesn't go as planned.

In all of this, Aparicio is a wonderful collaborator, capturing Cuarón's vision almost effortlessly. This is her film debut, and she had had no prior experience or training as an actress. Her work lacks the polish and interpretive focus of a trained actress, which in this case is a benefit. I don't think Cleo would be as moving a vehicle for Cuarón's social commentary were she played by someone with the tricks to help underline his meanings. Where a trained actress might have underlined the writer-director's work, Aparicio simply is. She inhabits the role in a simple, instinctive performance that is ultimately devastating.

By the film's end, this invisible woman has been shown to be the driving force behind the family's survival. She does so quite literally in the film's final movement, when, in the midst of her own personal crisis, she goes into the ocean without hesitation when she fears something has happened to two of the children. The scenes that follow, with the family's homecoming, underline her marginalized status. When the camera follows her as she climbs the stairs at the end, it's almost as though the character herself were ascending. It's a great moment of exaltation — not mindlessly optimistic, but rather grounded in the full knowledge of the character's social standing in a world too preoccupied with class and material worth to give her the value the film does.  

  Christmas with Virginia Madsen, Aidan Langford, Cory Michael Smith and Michael Chiklis in 1985, a gift that doesn't keep on giving.

Cory Michael Smith has the narrow, angular face of an El Greco saint. When he puts on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and goes all manic as Edward Nygma on Gotham — a TV series noted for its stylish, over-the-top villains — his face works beautifully to reinforce the character's special brand of crazy. It can also twist into an impressive mask of suffering, which is almost enough to salvage Yen Tan's 1985 (2018). Smith, who also co-produced, stars as a young man visiting his Texas family after a three-year absence. His father (Michael Chiklis) is emotionally withdrawn; his mother (Virginia Madsen) is the family peacekeeper; and son Adrian (Smith) is living a typical gay life for the period, out in the mecca of New York, closeted at home. It's a situation familiar to anybody drawn to gay theatre or independent films or who lived through the 1980s. Adrian has come home seeking some kind of closure with his family and his ex-girlfriend (Jamie Chung). Can he come out and tell them he's HIV-positive in an era when the diagnosis was a virtual death sentence?

It's not just that the coming-out drama has been done before and better in TV movies like An Early Frost (1985), Consenting Adult (1985) and Doing Time on Maple Drive (1992). It's that 1985 seems to have been written in 1985. There's none of the innovative storytelling that made Angels in America (1991-1992) or Parting Glances (1986) or even Longtime Companion (1989) such groundbreaking works. Not only does the script by Tan and cinematographer Hutch offer nothing new on the subject. What it does offer is presented in a flat and plodding style. Hutch shoots the film in a murky black and white, and he and Tan don't create many expressive images. There are a lot of shots that just feel wrong — close-ups that need to be two shots or people just standing in front of the environment without really seeming to inhabit it. Is this an attempt to make the family's home, Fort Worth, seem like the kind of place any thinking individual would want to escape? If so, it's a rather condescending approach. It's not as if Adrian suddenly turned into a sensitive individual on his own. There must be something back home that shaped him.

This is particularly regrettable because every now and then there's a nice touch in the writing that suggests that Tan and Hutch could have written a better script if they'd just been willing to dig a bit more deeply into their story's context. When Smith visits Chung in Dallas, she's doing a comedy routine at a local club. It's not only better shot than most of the film, but it's also better written as she riffs on being a Korean-American in white-bread Texas. Later Smith takes his brother (Aidan Langford) to the movies. The movie the kid wants to see, A Chorus Line (1985), is sold out (luckily for them; that film was so bad it could probably turn people off to musical theatre and gay life forever), so they end up seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddie's Revenge (1985), the most homoerotic horror film of its day. But in both cases, as soon as the moment lands, it's right back to plodding dramatics that seem more about putting people into telling situations than letting the characters actually breathe.

None of this is the fault of the cast. They all work very hard at bringing Tan and Hutch's moribund dialogue to life and in some cases succeed. Smith captures the way closeted gay men are constantly shifting roles. He's a different person with his parents than he is with his former girlfriend or his kid brother or when he calls one of his roommates in New York. And when he has to suffer, he's totally committed to the moment. Chiklis is saddled with one of the film's most unfortunate scenes. In a late night conversation with his son, he reveals that he's known Adrian is gay for years because, in essence, he stalked him while visiting New York. This is about three quarters of the way through the film, but there's been nothing in his behavior to suggest any of this. It suddenly comes up out of nowhere. The scene ends with him warning Smith not to tell his mother, because it would destroy her. Yet we've already seen enough of her sympathetic nature to know that she'd probably handle it better than her husband. Did the script really need to drive home his lack of awareness of his own family? Chiklis connects to the material, but for all his efforts, the scene just doesn't ring true.

Madsen connects well, too, and has one of the film's better scenes, when she confides to her son that she voted for Mondale rather than Reagan. It's a lot more believable when she warns Smith not to out her to his father. She also has a really lovely moment at the end when all she has to do is turn off the radio. It's a Christian talk show, and she makes it a subtle moment of rebellion. Langford, as the younger brother, is also deeply resonant, though you can pretty much tell his story from his first moment on screen. You don't need to find out that he quit the football team to join the school drama club to know that he's another gay boy in training.

The situation in 1985 is so basic that for a lot of audience members the resonance is built in, and I've spoken to people who saw themselves in the movie so thoroughly they had no problems relating to the material. Yet I can't help wishing the audience and the cast had been given something deeper. Coming out and dealing with AIDS are primal experiences in most gay men's lives. That people survive them at all is a testament to the strength and resilience of LGBTQ+ peoples. There are many films that have captured that sense of power. 1985's actors and audience deserve that kind of movie.

  Domestic matters concern Jane Darwell, John Beal and Rosalind Rusell — in a gown that helps make the domestic universal — in Craig's Wife.

One of the joys of Turner Classic Movies is the opportunity it gives viewers to discover great films they may have overlooked. Combining the network with a good DVR creates an education in film history. That happened to me when I taped most of a night of John Beal films and finally got a look at Dorothy Arzner's amazing 1936 film adaptation of George Kelly's Pulitzer Prize play Craig's Wife. Like many plays from the 1920s and 1930s, the original seems over-written. It takes forever to make its points. Arzner and screenwriter Mary C. McCall, Jr., reduce the running time to less than 90 minutes, and that includes a few scenes added to open the piece up. Yet they don't miss a beat. The thing moves along pretty rapidly without making the viewer feel rushed, and, if anything, the cutting actually adds to the play.

Both versions focus on Harriet Craig (Rosalind Russell), a woman whose god is materialism. Although her husband (John Beal) loves her, she views him as simply a convenience, the source of a house she treasures more than she could another human being. During the course of one day, he becomes aware of just how mercenary she is and leaves her. Kelly provides a mirror of their unsatisfactory relationship in the marriage of Fergus Passmore, a friend of the husband's who kills his wife in the throes of jealousy and then kills himself. In the play, we simply hear about the case. In the film, however, we go with the husband on a visit to Passmore where we see the man's suffering through his unhappy marriage. The scene is short, but Thomas Mitchell makes the most of it, turning Passmore into an abject character whose grief over his wife's neglect has caused him to lose most of his friends.

That's just one scene, of course. The entire movie —from the opening in which the housekeeper (Jane Darwell) tries to stop the new maid (Nydia Westman) from moving Russell's prized Grecian urn, to the final scene, when Russell pays for her shortcomings and finally realizes the cost of cutting herself off from others to focus on her house — is all of a piece. Arzner moves from one plot point to another effortlessly. Her special gift was finding ways to make acting, script and design all work together to capture a sense of human experience. Given the studios' tendency to type her for "women's subjects," this inevitably translates to female experience.

The advantage to Arzner's brisk pace is the way it focuses the story more clearly on the tragedy of Harriet Craig. Kelly's original play, which seems to go on forever, tends to lose its points in all the padding. Although some scholars have suggested the focus of his dramatic barbs was materialism, it's hard not to read the play as misogynistic. Harriet would seem to represent a nightmare version of woman in her ordained social role as homemaker. She's done such a thorough job of creating the perfect home she can't allow anything to disrupt it. She only lets her husband smoke in certain rooms and has driven away most of his friends because she can't keep the place tidy if people keep parading in and out. The fact that it's the women in her life, her niece and her husband's aunt, who first see through her, only underlies the script's patriarchal subtext. They represent the "good woman" who realizes that everything a woman does takes second place to her primary function, keeping some man happy.

The film's more compact script, however, subtly shifts the meanings. In Act II, Kelly gives Harriet a justification for her devotion to house over husband:

I saw what happened to my own mother, and I made up my mind it'd never happen to me. She was one of those "I will follow thee, my husband" women — that believed everything my father told her; and all the time he was mortgaging her home over her head for another woman. And when she found it out, she did the only thing that women like her can do, and that was to die of a broken heart — within six months; and leave the door open for the other woman to come in as stepmother over Estelle and me. And then get rid of us both as soon as Estelle was marriageable. But the house was never mortgaged over her head, I'll promise you that; for she saw to it that it was put in her name before ever she took him; and she kept it there, too, right to the finish.

In the play, that speech, although well placed at a climactic moment, tends to get lost in the shuffle. In the film, however, it feels much more prominent. Arzner shoots it in close-up, and Russell brings it just the right level of fervor to make it important but not overstated. She also cuts everything after "broken heart," so there's little mention of the woman who stole Harriet's father from his wife. As a result, Harriet's pathology is presented as the result of her mistreatment by the first prominent man in her life.

Arzner also does more with the film's end. Kelly's presentation of the final scene is rather subtle. A neighbor has dropped off some roses for Craig's aunt, who has already left to get away from Harriet. Earlier, Harriet had ordered a similar gift out of the living room because real flowers are messy. In the final scene, she holds the flowers, not noticing as they drop petals on the floor. Rather than use the falling petals to drive home her point (Arzner has already made great use of other objects, particularly Harriet's treasured urn, the husband's cigarettes and the house keys), Arzner simply uses close-ups of Russell, who suffers impressively at the realization of her ultimate isolation.

Russell rarely had a kind word for this film, even though it convinced her home studio, MGM, to give her bigger and more demanding roles. She fought against the loan-out to Columbia to do the picture. In fact, Columbia head Harry Cohn only asked to borrow her for the role because he didn't want any of his contract female stars to play such an unpleasant character (this was two years after Bette Davis became a star playing the even more unpleasant Mildred in 1934's Of Human Bondage).

For all her misgivings, however, she turns in a masterful performance. Early Russell is a revelation. There's a lightness to her work that fades by the late 1940s. She uses her stage training to great advantage. Her perfect posture and clipped diction help express Harriet's detached superiority. Oddly, they also anticipate her best work in comedies like The Women (1939) and His Girl Friday (1940). Her freshness gives the work an almost improvisational quality that's far from the heavy, over-determined work of films like Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), Picnic (1955) or Five Finger Exercise (1962).

Arzner sets her off to good effect. One of her smartest choices was to go for a Grecian style for the living room set. Working with former silent star Billy Haines (who's not credited), she turns the home into a temple for Harriet. For her big confrontation with Beal, costumer Lon Anthony even incorporates Grecian elements into her gown. The lines show off Russell's height and bearing. She's almost unbelievably svelte, like a goddess expecting to be worshipped.

This wasn't Harriet Craig's only screen appearance. Irene Rich had played her in a 1928 silent, and Joan Crawford starred in a 1950 remake named for the character. The latter has become the most famous translation of the work, which is a pity. The connection between Harriet's compulsive housekeeping and the legends about Crawford's incessant cleaning in real life gives the whole thing an air of camp, while the adaption loses most of the original's resonance. The murder-suicide subplot is gone, and Harriet's machinations start moving into the land of bad soap opera. All that tends to push Arzner's superior version into the shadows. Without TCM, it would likely stay there.