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

      Water the Greatest Treasure      Henry Hathaway's movies can be relied on to provide good entertainment, competently executed and well-acted.   Niagara (1953) and True Grit (1969) stand out in my experience as excellent dramas, highlighting their respective stars, Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne.  Wayne appeared in Legend of the Lost (1957) along with Rossano Brazzi and Sophia Loren.  Though it takes place in the 1950s present, starting in Timbuktu, the journey undertaken across the Sahara by Paul Bonnard (Brazzi), Dita (Loren), and the amusingly named Joe January (Wayne) extends the modern characters seemingly into the deep past.  On a search for a lost city, they encounter nomadic Tuaregs and end up in a Roman ruin, Timgad in modern Libya.  The Libyan location shooting itself makes this film unusual, considering the chaos and strife in that nation during this decade.      Dunes, drifting sand particles, la...

      Ridley Scott's Cop Drama      In Black Rain (1989) we never see Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas), a New York policeman, driving a car.  In the first scene he challenges a motorcyclist to a race.  After winning, he's home playing a message from his ex-wife about not getting the kids this upcoming weekend.  He rides his motorcycle to work, runs into his partner, Charlie Vincent (Andy Garcia), gives him a ride.        Later, during lunch in a restaurant/bar, three Japanese tough guys enter and challenge some older men seated at a round table.  The tallest and most menacing man, Sato (Yûsaku Matsuda), slices the throat of one of the seated Japanese men while covered, gun-wise, by the other two toughs.      It's Yakuza business, Japanese mafia.  Sato takes a box from the man he's just murdered.  They leave, pursued by Nick Conklin.  He later collars Sato.  Charlie and Nick are...

      Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet      Danish director Dreyer's penultimate film, Ordet (1955), meaning The Word , based on a Kaj Munk play, takes place in 1925.  The affluent Borgen family--an elderly father with three sons, one of whom is married with two daughters--must deal with two problems concerning religion.  The youngest son, Anders (Cay Kristiansen), loves the daughter of a tailor, Peter (Ejner Federspiel).  Peter, apart from being poorer than the Borgens, also belongs to a Fundamentalist sect and will not have Anders for a son-in-law unless he converts from Lutheranism to Peter's religion.      The other religiously related problem for the Borgens derives from the middle son Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) and his absolute conviction that he's Jesus of Nazareth.  Regarded as crazy, he's nevertheless gentle and harmless, although he tends to run away for days at a time.  He also freaks out visitors unfami...

      Invasion U.S.A.      In 1985, America lived in simmering Cold War fear of nuclear annihilation, President Reagan doing his best to chill citizens who didn't vote for him and those who did with stories about Reds, Marxists, Sandinistas, Communists, Russians, all making trouble for freedom-loving democracies.  His bullshit could replace the Democrats' Russiagate hysteria these days without alteration in theme, if not in details.      The same president who ordered the mining of Nicaragua's harbors while backing an illegal war in that country, also supporting massacres by death squads in El Salvador, was himself a terrorist.      In the Good Guys versus Bad Guys belief system of Chuck Norris--himself, to this day, a rather brainless Republican--the enemy is without, a force willing and able to invade the blameless U.S. of A.       Invasion U.S.A . starts with a massacre of Cuban refugees on a boat wi...

      The Mechanic (1972)      Michael Winner's The Mechanic follows a hit man, Arthur Bishop (Charles Bronson), as he goes about his normal work routines resulting in killing people for money.  He has a talent for making his kills look like accidents, as when he stakes out a man's apartment, takes photos through a telescope of belongings, the location of a box of tea and the brand.  He picks the lock to the man's place, replaces tea bags with others of the same variety, these new ones treated with some knockout drug.  He smears plastic explosive into the inside cover of a hardcover book, devises a way, using wax, of making the gas stove pilot light but not ignite right away, goes across the street to the temporarily rented crummy room he's inhabiting and waits for hours for the man to come home, make his tea, relax on his bed with a book (one different than the volume with the explosive).  Bishop puts together his rifle, takes aim, a...

      What We Do in the Shadows      From 2014, What We Do in the Shadows , a "mockumentary" from New Zealand, shows the nightly lives of four vampires sharing a house in Wellington.  Captions at the beginning inform the viewer that the camera crew wore crosses throughout filming and were granted protection by the vampires.      The film itself was directed by Taika Waititi (also directed Thor: Ragnarok ) and Jemaine Clement.  Waititi plays Viago, Clement plays Vladislav, a vampire based loosely on the fifteenth century nobleman, Vlad the Impaler.  Jonny Brugh plays Deacon, the "young" hell raising vampire among the group.  At 8,000 years, Petyr (Ben Fransham) is the oldest, looks like Nosferatu, says very little and due to his appearance never goes out on the town as the others do.      The film deals a lot with petty disputes among the flatmates.  No one does the dishes; Deacon is lax in doing hou...

     Invaders from Mars (1953)      An imaginative and curious boy, David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt), sets his alarm for four o'clock so he can look through his telescope at Orion's Great Nebula.  The sound wakes up his parents, Mary (Hillary Brooke) and George (Leif Erickson).  George enthusiastically takes a look at the Nebula while Mary tells David to return to bed.  At 4:40 A.M. a thunderstorm wakes up David.  He looks out his window, sees a flying saucer hovering over a nearby sandy field.  It disappears below the horizon.  He wakes up his parents to tell them about it.  They don't believe him, playing the condescending act of caring mentors humoring a smart kid with too many fancies they don't have time to hear about.      "It was just a dream," Mary tells her son.      He knows what he saw, though.  At dawn he gets up and investigates.  There's nothing where the saucer apparentl...

      Tolkien, the Movie      I read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was ten.  He had died the previous year.  His books and his fantasy land creation, Middle Earth, were famous by then; his fame grew into the 1980s and 1990s, even before director Peter Jackson bowdlerized first The Lord of the Rings and then mangled The Hobbit .      The books are still popular because they're great and readable stories centering on small seemingly insignificant people called upon to do courageous deeds.  Both novels focus on Hobbits as protagonists, little furry-footed people who act much like country English folk.  Their homeland, the Shire, looks like the rolling green hills of numerous parts of England.      Tolkien, born in 1892, wasn't from England.  His parents were living in South Africa when he was born, but he mostly grew up in England, was orphaned young, going on to live ...

      The Day of the Wolves      This low budget crime film from 1971, shot on location in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, reminded me of another film, Reservoir Dogs , and a novel, The Score by Richard Stark (alias Donald Westlake).  Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs  (1992) has a criminal mastermind assembling a group of lesser criminals to do a job that doesn't come off as planned.  The mastermind allows no actual names to be used, assigning instead colors to each participant; hence, Mr. Brown, Mr. Pink, etc.  In The Score (1964), fifth of the Parker series of crime novels, career criminal Parker assembles a gang of accomplices to help him rob an entire small town.   The Day of the Wolves , written and directed by Ferde Grofé, Jr., seems inspired by Stark's novel, while Tarantino seems to have borrowed from The Day of the Wolves .      Jan Murray, an actor with a long career also as a standup comedian, plays Numbe...

     Furious       Furious Seven  (2015) and The Fate of the Furious  (2017) up the ante in terms of cinematic action insanity.  Each film in the (so far) eight part franchise builds from the previous entry in action set pieces, topping the last entry in excitement but also in improbability and outright impossibility.       The Fast and the Furious (2001), the first film in the series, wild and at times hard to swallow as it is, is realism when compared with the seventh and eighth films.   Furious Seven  features Paul Walker's final performance as former FBI agent Brian O'Conner.  The actor's death at the age of forty in a car accident occurred while he was still working on the film, necessitating some body doubling, except I couldn't tell when this occurs in the movie.  His role does seem reduced from what it should've been, considering his major contributions to the first, second, fourth, fifth, and si...

      The Forgotten Pistolero       In the 1980s, my father and I went to the local university to see a screening of Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum , a film I found to be impressive while my father had mixed feelings.  To my mother he described it as "a semi-great film."       Semi-great film , to this day, for me, accurately describes a small number of movies, including The Forgotten Pistolero (1969), directed by Ferdinando Baldi.  Taking place in Mexico and Texas in the nineteenth century, the film depicts the reunion of two old friends, Rafael Garcia (Peter Martell) and Sebastian Carrasco (Leonard Mann).  They were separated during childhood when Sebastian's upper class mother, Anna (Luciana Paluzzi), and her lover Tomas (Alberto de Mendoza), murdered Sebastian's father, General Carrasco (José Suarez), soon after he returned from a successful military campaign.      Rafael, grown up, takes an interest ...

      Identikit, a.k.a. The Driver's Seat      Based on Muriel Spark's novel, The Driver's Seat , Identikit (1974) stars Elizabeth Taylor, dominating a film shot in Munich and Rome, directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi.  Luchino Visconti had wanted to make an adaptation of the novel with Glenda Jackson in the role of Lise, played by Taylor.  That would've been an interesting film experience, because of Visconti's greatness as a director as well as Jackson's tendency towards superb acting.      Still, Identikit has many compelling scenes, mostly those centering on Elizabeth Taylor's portrayal of an apparently mentally ill woman (at the least, a decidedly odd duck).        Lise flies to Rome in search of a specific man, apparently, but as the film unfolds, this sought for man could be any of several men she encounters.  As she puts it vehemently, she's not interested in sex.  She purchases a sharp ...

      Woman Obsessed      The 1959 film's title misleads.  It sounds noirish, a vengeance picture, maybe, but it also suggests melodrama.  It is that, but the location and subject matter surprises: Saskatchewan, a married couple and their young son, a forest fire killing the husband--a volunteer firefighter--and the husband's friend who takes a job helping on their small farm.  Not a city story, as the theme of obsession might imply.      After the grief subsides, Mary Sharron (Susan Hayward) becomes more and more attracted to the helper, Fred Carter (Stephen Boyd, in the same year he famously starred in Ben-Hur ).  Fred digs her, too, and likes her son, Robbie (Dennis Holmes), that is, until the boy faints at the sight of a deer's blood after refusing to learn how to dress it.  Robbie is hypersensitive about death, about animals suffering.  Fred can't understand this--he also has a chip on his shoulder. ...

      The Missouri Breaks      Montana scenery is on beautiful display in this western from 1976, directed by Arthur Penn.      A wealthy landowner, David Braxton (John McLiam), extrajudicially hangs a cattle rustler who's the associate and friend of Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson), Calvin (Harry Dean Stanton), Little Tod (Randy Quaid), Si (John P. Ryan), and Cary (Frederic Forrest).  Stunned at first by this, the friends of the dead rustler hatch a plan to buy a farm next to Braxton's land.  They begin stealing his horses, and then they hang, tit for tat, one of Braxton's most valued men.      Braxton's daughter, Jane (Kathleen Lloyd), takes a fancy to Tom Logan, who spends much of his time on the farm while the others maintain their hideout where they keep their stolen horses and other animals.      David Braxton, meanwhile, hires Robert E. Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando), a regulator, a hit man, expert a...

      Sitting Bull in Cinemascope, an Earnest Attempt at Depicting Native American History      In Hollywood films of the studio period, Native Americans were usually portrayed by White actors and actresses covered in "accurate" makeup.  Actual Native Americans were sometimes employed as extras, a practice of John Ford, who used them for their horseback riding skills.  In the same way, the Chinese police detective, Charlie Chan, was played by Warner Oland, a Swedish-American.  Oland's acting was never at fault, but one wonders how the Charlie Chan films would've come off had a real Chinese actor played the part.      During World War Two, Japanese characters were played by Asian-Americans descended from countries other than Japan, America's enemy.      Much along these lines has changed since then.  The lead Cambodian character in The Killing Fields , for instance, was played by a Cambodian.  Nativ...