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

      Brando in The Wild One      Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) has a chip on his shoulder.  The head of a motorcycle gang, he rides into a town with his men, watches the end of a cross country motorcycle race, accepts the second place trophy one of his men steals, ties it to his front fender.  Stolen glory.      In The Wild One (1953), directed by Hungarian born Laslo Benedek (who made the first screen adaptation of Death of a Salesman ), authority figures like the Sheriff (Jay C. Flippen) conclude that Johnny and his kind don't know what they're rebelling against.  We're left wondering as Johnny and his gang take off at the end, after terrorizing a different town.      A member of a rival gang formerly associated with Johnny's, Chino (Lee Marvin), a drunken yet almost amiable lout, gets arrested after getting into an altercation with a prominent townie.  The police chief, Harry Bleeker (Robert Keith...

      Siberiade      I've seen three films directed by Andrey Mikhalkov-Konchalovskiy: A Nest of Gentry (which got me into reading Ivan Turgenev), Runaway Train , and now Siberiade , a four and a half hour epic about  the village of Elan in Western Siberia from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s, dealing with two families.      One strong aspect of this 1979 film is the imagery.  The village, perched on top of a bluff above a winding river, surrounded by dark evergreen trees and a great deal of silence, has a gate through which several characters, in the same kind of repeating slow motion shot over many decades, run down to the river--to escape, to greet someone, or to find out something.  The location amounts to a character, bracketed at the beginning and end by images from the most recent story set in the 1960s, when oil begins to gush from beneath the village.  The well catches on fire, gets out o...

      Walk Cheerfully      Yasujiro Ozu's Walk Cheerfully (1930), in spite of its title, is a crime melodrama.  Kenji--Ken the Knife (Minoru Takada)--is a thief working with a small gang.  One day, he sees Yasue (Hiroko Kawasaki) emerging from a jewelry store and getting into a big expensive car.  He believes she's a wealthy young woman, but his associate and past love interest, Chieko (Satoko Date), works in the same office with Yasue.  Ono (Takeshi Sakamoto), their boss, comes on to Yasue.  He sent her to the jewelry store in his car, and evidently wants to make her his mistress, Mad Men -style.      Later, Kenji nearly runs over Yasue's little sister.  This only in a movie-type coincidence commences his relationship with Yasue, who, finding out he's a criminal, insists she'll not have anything to do with him unless he adopts a straight life.  He loses friends, including the embittered Chieko, when he ...

      Curse of Chucky      Of the seven Chucky Child's Play movies, Curse of Chucky (2013) is the sixth.  I would've liked to have reviewed Child's Play 3 , having reviewed the first two in the series, but I haven't seen it yet.  I figured I could watch Curse of Chucky without much confusion.  I was right.  A red-haired doll possessed by the malevolent spirit of a dead serial killer, Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif, who's provided Chucky's distinctive voice throughout the series) comes into the hands of a new family, the Pierces--mayhem follows.      Fiona Dourif, Brad's daughter, plays a wheelchair bound young woman, Nica Pierce, daughter of a woman with mental problems.  The mother spends her free time painting one subject: sunflowers.  She was traumatized and terrorized in the past by Charles Lee Ray, a friend of her husband's.  Ray killed him, obsessed with the wife who was nine months pregnant with...

      Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!      I watched this film from 2001 because I have a DVD of it given to me by my sister a few years ago, and also because Nicole Kidman stars in the lead female role.  Having finally gotten around to watching it, I'm not sorry I did, but I found my attention wandering at times.  It's so colorful and edited with such music video style flair that it reminded me of the cinematic equivalent of the candy Pop Rocks, sweet powdery stuff bursting on the tongue, leaving behind no nutritional experience.      On the other hand, the film's doomed love story affected me uncomfortably, since the love triangle connecting singer/dancer Satine (Kidman), the Duke (Richard Roxburgh), and Christian (Ewan McGregor) reminded me of a similar situation in my past, causing me to think too much of that as I watched the film's rather dark second half.      Movies evoke emotions, or should do so, even w...

      Vladimir et Rosa       Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin made several films together in the late 1960s and early 1970s using the name Dziga Vertov Group, after the Soviet 1920s experimental film director.  Today I read a long interview from 1970 with the two filmmakers published on the Seven Stories Press website.  Just eight days before the Kent State massacre, in which four students protesting Nixon and Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia were murdered by the National Guard, Gorin predicted that American college students would soon face the fire given out by their own government, as French students had been experiencing, especially during the mass protest events of May and June 1968.      The tone of the interview suggests a pair of engaged French intellectuals embarked upon the thankless job of using cinema as a tool for new expressions, subordinated to a political intent never giving way to the lucrative temptation of c...

      The Teahouse of the August Moon      Like Le Silence de le Mer , Daniel Mann's The Teahouse of the August Moon  depicts a narrow slice of World War Two; in this case, the U.S. occupation of Okinawa in 1946.  Where the former film is grim and dramatic, the latter is a somewhat satirical comedy from 1956 featuring Marlon Brando's now incredible-seeming performance as an Okinawan interpreter.  With makeup, his epicanthic folds mask the familiar face, but below, especially when he smiles, he's Brando.      Still, as Sakini, he does a good job relating a story of how Army Captain Fisby (Glenn Ford), assigned to a poor village to supervise the building of a schoolhouse and bring American democratic values to the people there, goes native.      Colonel Wainwright (Paul Ford), who puts up an excess of signs and goes on at length about Mrs. Wainwright's morals as they relate to the fundamentals of democracy--a g...

      Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Silence de la Mer      Jean-Pierre Melville (director of masterpieces such as Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge ) made his first feature, Le Silence de la Mer , in 1949.  A small story set during the German occupation of France, there are three main characters, two of whom barely speak, although the old man (Jean-Marie Robain) narrates the film, an account of a German officer, Werner von Ebrennac (Howard Vernon), taking a room upstairs in the elder's house.  An interloper, von Ebrennac seems conscious of his intrusion.  He seeks every night around nine o'clock to make his hosts feel comfortable with his presence.  The uncle lives with his niece (Nicole Stéphane) who concentrates mostly on her knitting and sewing.  The uncle and niece have long established the routine of spending their evenings in a study lined with books and maps, a fireplace warming the room in the colder months.  The officer a...

      Harry Callahan Kills Many in Sudden Impact      Inspector Callahan feels hemmed in by the law he represents.   Sudden Impact (1983), directed by and starring Clint Eastwood in the fourth film featuring "Dirty Harry," makes it easy for the audience to understand who's good and who's bad, except that trigger-squeezing mayhem caused by a grim cop lacking the patience to negotiate isn't necessarily beneficial to peace, in my opinion.  Granted, he puts down "punks," wiping out in one early scene at least five young Black men holding up a diner, before walking away without receiving more than a scolding, and orders to take a few days off.      Meanwhile, the more interesting subplot--a story crossing paths with Harry later on to become the main plot--deals with Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke), an artist commissioned to refurbish an old merry-go-round in a small city near San Francisco.  Nearby in this amusement park is the ...

      Bela Lugosi in Bowery at Midnight      Bela Lugosi plays two roles in Bowery at Midnight (1942): psychology Professor Brenner and an operator of a soup kitchen in the Bowery, Karl Wagner.  The film is not a Bowery Boys movie, though it rivals that series in absurdities.      Professor Brenner's dual identity, hidden even from his wife, has the purpose of carrying off crimes such as murders and robberies.  He recruits down and out men at his soup kitchen, the Bowery Friendly Mission.  He employs a pretty nurse, Judy (Wanda McKay), to provide free medical treatment to those who need it.  She's oblivious to what's going on behind the Mission's secret doors.      Brenner/Wagner's modus operandi consists of recruiting, say, a safecracker to help him knock off a jewelry store.  The safecracker is then knocked off, as in made dead, by another henchman who gets cold feet eventually about killing. ...

      Remake a Classic?      Joseph Losey wanted Charles Laughton to play the child killer in his remake of  M (1951), the Fritz Lang masterpiece reviewed elsewhere in this blog.  Instead, he got David Wayne, a capable actor, but as Martin Harrow, one who lures and then murders small children, he doesn't carry the psychopathological weight of Peter Lorre in the original film.  Laughton, had he played the role, would've been, I think, truly scary--his physical bulk combined with a friendly face making him almost like a friendly clown.      Since I've seen the original film, this remake hides whether or not it's good.  Because Lang's film is so powerful and the story so riveting, it's hard to tell if Losey's version is good by itself.  The remake sticks to the original story, mostly, showing some of the same shots, like the famous one of the child's balloon drifting away after the killer makes his move off camera....

      The Romantic Englishwoman      Joseph Losey said, "Films can illustrate our existence...they can distress, disturb and provoke people into thinking about themselves and certain problems.  But not give the answers."       The Romantic Englishwoman (1975) plays with ideas of marital jealousy, fiction versus fact, romantic escapism, and the master/servant relationship more fully and brilliantly developed in Losey's The Servant (1963).      The central relationship is an uneasy marriage between a novelist, Lewis Fielding (Michael Caine), and Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson).  They have a young son, a young nanny, and a housemaid.  They occupy a rich social circle that includes a newspaper writer, Isabel (Kate Nelligan).  Lewis can't stand Isabel.  His screaming tirade against her and her profession shows what kind of an edgy, frustrated creative artist he is, at the time the film takes place, anyway. ...

      The Last Film Joseph Losey Made Before He Was Blacklisted By Patriots      The Hollywood Blacklist cruelly and cravenly destroyed and altered many careers of talented and original film artists.  Actress Lee Grant, for example, didn't work for over a decade, all because of the most marginal connection to the American Left.  Elia Kazan maintained his career because he named names, earning him the resentful stares of numerous glitterati at an Academy Awards show when he received a lifetime achievement Oscar.  Few of those dissing him really know what they would do if faced with the choice of career or no career in Hollywood.  Dalton Trumbo wrote scripts using pseudonyms until Kirk Douglas, star and executive producer of Spartacus , put his name on the screen.  By then, 1960, anti-Communist fever had subsided from its 1950s peak.  By then, Joseph Losey was in England directing films under his own name.     ...

      Lady Snowblood      I happened upon Lady Snowblood (1973) two nights ago while channel surfing.  It was just starting on Turner Classic Movies.  I didn't intend at first to watch it, but the striking beginning, featuring a breech birth by a dying young woman in prison, held my attention long enough to make me want to see the film unfold.  Snow falling beyond vertical slats in the prison wall turns red, expressionistically, after the mother dies.  Before her final breaths, she says to her newborn daughter, "You will carry out my vendetta.  You are an asura , a demon!"      A mother calling her newborn a demon was enough to make me commit to watching a movie that started at 1:30 AM.      Directed by Toshiya Fujita, Lady Snowblood is enough like Quentin Tarantino's two Kill Bill movies to make me conclude that the tribute-practicing American based his revenge duology starring Uma Thurman on th...

      Ann Savage from Detour in Renegade Girl      Ann Savage, star of a lot of B movies in the 1940s, played an astonishingly nasty femme fatale in Detour (1945), now recognized as one of the great films noir.  When I, as Rhombus, made my short philosophical film noir parody, Sometimes Almost Never (see it on YouTube channel John Berner), I based the femme fatale, Wanda Mae Chisel (Imogen Lapp), on Savage's Detour character, although the latter possesses a much stronger acidity in her personality.  By contrast, I directed Imogen Lapp to display no affect, almost as if Greta Garbo were to play a killer.      Blonde and pretty, Savage was an A list-quality actress stuck somehow in B movies.  Her challenge as an artist was to make the most of her performances, to stand out above the mediocrity typically displayed in the plots of most of her movies.      The western  Renegade Girl (1946) takes place in ...

      From Russia with Love      The second James Bond movie, From Russia with Love (1963), directed by Terence Young, stars Sean Connery, reprising his secret agent role first seen in Young's Dr. No .  This sequel introduces the menacing organization, S.P.E.C.T.R.E., run by Ernst Blofeld, i.e. Number One (Anthony Dawson), never seen except as he pets his long-haired white cat.      This secret outfit works against the interests of both the Western powers and the Soviet Union.  Bond enters into his assignment--obtaining from a low-level KGB employee (Daniela Bianchi)--a decoder called a Lektor, something the size of a typewriter.  I found this aspect of the story illogical, since the KGB would likely change all of their codes if their main cryptographic instrument were stolen.  MI-6, Bond's agency, would then be in a position of having to crack another code.  Oh well.      Blofeld also wants the Le...

      A View to a Kill      Roger Moore's last appearance as James Bond took place in this 1985 film directed by John Glen, maker of two previous Bonds, For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy , plus the two later Timothy Dalton outings featuring the famous secret agent.   A View to a Kill , based on an Ian Fleming short story, features some of the zaniness of Octopussy  and is in several spots quite funny.  The villain, Max Zorin (a blonde Christopher Walken), is such an over the top violent lunatic that his outbursts of coldly dealt murder are weirdly funny in that he displays no qualms about adjusting the world to his liking.  Told that Zorin is a psychopath, raised by a Nazi scientist who continues to help him with his catastrophic plans, Bond sets out to eliminate him, not bothering to attempt to save his life, even when he can try.      The movie covers horse racing, the disappearance of a thoroughbred, a young blonde w...

      My Bollywood Bride      Alex Kincade (Jason Lewis), a magazine writer, meets Reena (Kashmira Shah) while she vacations in Venice, California.  Their short fling inspires him later on to try to find her in Mumbai.  It turns out she's a major movie star engaged to be married to a self-important producer, Shekhar Singh (Gulshan Grover).  Alex's amiable rickshaw driver, Priyad (Ash Chandler), sneaks him into Bollywood Studios where Reena Khanna is acting in her latest film, produced by Shekhar.      Shekhar likes to threaten people with the promise of making them vanish, "Like that!"  His finger snap adds flair which covers the fact that he feels the need to have bodyguards around him at all times.  A tough-talker, he meets his match in a determined rival, Alex.      Alex and Reena get reacquainted, he meets her parents.  They like him, but the influence and heft of Shekhar Singh's reputation...

      Long Lost      Diane Bell has written and directed three films.  From what I've seen in her second, Bleeding Heart (2015), I'd like to see the other two.      Jessica Biel plays May, a yoga instructor very much into Eastern philosophies and religions, at least in the surface ways of finding inner peace and saying Namaste a lot.  Her boyfriend, Dex (Edi Gathegi) also teaches these subjects, making a decent living at it, but overly concerned with money in May's view.      May never knew her mother, was adopted by a rich woman (Kate Burton).  After an investigation, May finds her long lost half-sister (Zosia Mamet), ten years younger and going by the name, Shiva.  Shiva gives sexual massages for a living.  Her boyfriend Cody (Joe Anderson) rustles clients for her to please.  She's not tranquil like May, doesn't give two shits about spirituality.        After the sis...