Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

      Back Roads, Dirty Blouse      Roger Corman's third film as a producer, The Fast and the Furious (1955), is a drive-in type movie with dialogue blunted in its potential sharpness by its ridiculousness.  The novel premise works, since Corman was able, with his typical small budget, to fit his plot (involving race cars, a kidnapping, an accused murderer running for Mexico) into file footage of a California speedy roadster race to Baja California.      Connie Adair (Dorothy Malone, two years before she won an Oscar for Written on the Wind ) has a beautiful white Jaguar two-seater.  On her way to enter the race, she stops at a cafe for an egg salad sandwich and a glass of pineapple juice.  She gets neither, having seated herself next to Frank Webster (John Ireland), a sullen dude in a black leather jacket scanning a newspaper.  The waitress and another customer get nosy about Connie and then about Webster.  They t...

     Beef      Joanne Dru (1922-1996), born with the remarkable name, Joanne Letitia LaCock, had a catlike appearance to her eyes and eyebrows.  I associate her with Westerns, with tight long skirts and long-sleeved blouses with fancy ruffles.  The woman waiting for her love interest to come home from the cattle drive; giving her deadbeat gambler husband an ultimatum he fails to live up to.      In Vengeance Valley (1951), directed by Richard Thorpe, Jen Strobie (Dru) is married to Lee Strobie (Robert Walker), a shit with a gambling problem and a talent for losing money.  Lee's foster brother, Owen Daybright (Burt Lancaster), is a ranch foreman who runs afoul of two brothers (John Ireland and Hugh O'Brian) whose sister (Sally Forrest) has given birth to a bastard child, father unknown--except to the brothers, who assume the perpetrator is Daybright.  Lee Strobie is the actual father.  The brothers, who lack disc...

      The First But Not the Last      Alice Guy-Blaché made 444 films from 1896 to 1920.  In 1906, she directed forty-two films alone, including an account of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, La vie du christ  ( The Life of Christ ).  I don't know if the following fact has anything to do with why she chose her subject, but Guy-Blaché was thirty-three when she made the film, the traditional age of Jesus at the time of his crucifixion.        The film, too, runs to just under thirty-three minutes.  Divided into twenty-five scenes, the camera set-ups, in keeping with the years of early cinema, remain still, except for one shot with a pan to the left following Jesus bearing his cross up the hill of Golgotha.  This short camera movement looks like an innovation, although it most likely isn't.  Alice Guy-Blaché did pioneer some visual effects and used interracial casts.  One of the striking things about L...

      Don't Call Him a Parasite       Venom , a PG-13 Marvel film that, given its violence and subtexts, would've been more effective as an R movie, is nevertheless an entertaining, funny, and well-executed effort directed by Ruben Fleischer.      An advertisement for Venom says, "The world has enough superheroes."  The anti-hero in question, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a journalist given to doing stories on the homeless, murders of the poor, and other subjects not covered in mainstream news.  He seems to be the one outsider-type reporter tolerated by a corporate news outlet, that is, until he interviews billionaire Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), who sends rockets out to comets and other extraterrestrial locations to research the possibility of life on other worlds.  One rocket returns, crash-landing in Malaysia, bearing a cargo of four utterly strange alien symbiotic life forms that take hold in hosts, operating that person but...

      A Nice Diversion      Guy Ritchie's first film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a fun, complex, witty crime romp from 1998.  Imaginatively shot and edited, the cinematography by Tim Maurice-Jones uses a sepia-tinted color that makes the film look like something from the 1960s, perhaps a movie that hasn't been restored by computers.  Niven Howie's editing unapologetically slows and speeds up action, stopping it sometimes in still frames, accompanied by narration that I found hard to absorb at first, but after a time I didn't care because the film takes off on its own, as if Ritchie figured the viewer would eventually watch it again to get the nuances.      According to a short IMDB biography, Ritchie's film school experience influenced him only insofar as he found the other students' films boring.  He evidently wanted to do something with verve and aliveness, much as new wave British filmmakers of the 1960s like...

      Stepping on Mines      Six years before Sylvester Stallone, as a Vietnam War veteran, shot up a Pacific Northwest town and its aggressively mean law enforcement personnel in First Blood , Fred Williamson directed and acted in Mean Johnny Barrows (1976).  The film's refrain, "Peace is Hell," points to how, for the veteran, turmoil continues in a country where racism and exploitation are constant factors in African-American lives, just as they're a crushing reality for the people of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era and the earlier First Indochina War.      Johnny Barrows was awarded the Silver Star but was dishonorably discharged from the Army for punching a white superior officer.  His discharge, something he tries to keep to himself as a way of retaining pride, even as he accepts a janitorial job at a garage run by a sour and stingy asshole who, after a month, pays him just twenty-five dollars, prompting a scuffle ...

      The Western Kubrick Didn't Make      Rod Serling wrote a screenplay that was never adapted, based on The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider.  The novel, based somewhat on the story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, was next worked on by Sam Peckinpah, whose script was picked up by Marlon Brando's production company Pennebaker Productions.  Brando hired Stanley Kubrick to direct, but Kubrick wanted a different script, so Peckinpah was out and Calder Willingham, chucking much of the novel's content and leaving out the Billy the Kid/Garrett theme except as a vague idea, was in.  Brando and Kubrick reportedly butted heads over some minor tiff, so the director was fired, leading him to make Lolita .      With filming about to begin, Brando volunteered to direct, the Paramount executives agreed.  Years later, by his own admission, Brando "didn't know what to do."  The film, called One-Eyed Jacks (...

      A Call From a Phone Booth May Lead to a Beating      The definition of dead reckoning:      "The process of calculating one's position, especially at sea, by estimating the direction and distance traveled rather than by using landmarks, astronomical observations, or electronic navigation methods."      Rita Hayworth was cast to play Dusty Chandler in John Cromwell's 1947 film noir, Dead Reckoning , but acted in Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai instead.  Both are femme fatale roles, both are killers who steer the protagonists away from the truth, with deadly results.  Welles had Hayworth's red hair dyed blonde.  Lizabeth Scott, Hayworth's replacement, already had a rich blonde mass of beautiful hair and the bonus of a husky voice.  Curiously, she also bore a resemblance to low-voiced Lauren Bacall, married to the male lead in Dead Reckoning , Humphrey Bogart.      The film d...