by Dean | Sep 19, 2018 | General
A ’52 film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s story, “The Secret Sharer,” offers James Mason as the newly commanding sea captain. He and director John Brahm do estimable work on the 48-minute effort, even if Mason may be too old for the role.
Going against social morality, Conrad’s, and Mason’s, captain protects a sailor, Leggatt (Michael Pate), who has committed murder. He did so, indeed, out of the same sense of duty that the captain possesses, but he will never be understood by the navy (or society?). Likewise the captain is not yet understood by his crew. He so resembles Leggatt that the latter amounts to being the captain’s “other self,” and it was exactly right for the production company to cast an actor who looks a lot like Mason. And The Secret Sharer (in black and white, naturally) looks a lot like Conrad.
by Dean | Sep 16, 2018 | General
Dick Heldar in The Light That Failed, William Wellman‘s film of 1939, is a London painter who eventually goes blind long after receiving a head-slashing wound on the battlefield. A message is conveyed: There is a great deal that will not break a man, but war will.
Heldar is not broken, for example, by his sweetheart Maisie’s leaving him, or by Cockney girl Bessie’s wronging him, but war is another matter. Wellman’s direction of this adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s first novel is expert, although most of the cast is just okay. Ronald Colman decorates the film without solidifying it, as Wellman does. His opening war sequence is engrossing. For good measure, there is also Ida Lupino—true and energetic as the pathetic Bessie.
by Dean | Sep 14, 2018 | General
The recent picture Juliet, Naked (2018)—in which no one gets naked—is amusing and poignant and pleasantly, vividly acted by Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke. However, the story it tells is not as rich, or as interesting, as that in the Nick Hornby novel it derives from. In fact it becomes contrived and forced.
Scripted by two women and one man, it is skeptical of the male sex and, up to a point, traditional living. It ends with a dose of boring contemporary feminism: You can have it all, Annie (Byrne’s character)! Whether she can have it all or not, it’s hackneyed.
I’m sorry Nick Hornby was involved in the making of this film. His novel is a success. The film is not. It was directed by Jesse Peretz and produced by Judd Apatow, still a mediocrity.
by Dean | Sep 12, 2018 | General
Michel Garfinkiel used the phrase “classic French society” in the May 2007 issue of Commentary magazine. The sentence he wrote was: “Classic French society—the one that lasted from the revolution to the end of the 20th century, that is on display in the pages of the great French novelists, and that features in the work of the great film-makers from Renoir to Truffaut, from Chabrol to Sautet—was based first and foremost on strong nuclear families.”
Some years after the 20th century’s end, Avenue Montaigne (2006), by Daniele Thompson, appears and classic French society is all over it. What we see is as classic as anything in Renoir or Truffaut, and (alas) it’s a society that no longer exists. I deplore having to add, however, that strong nuclear families are not behind it. People both married and raising children do not show up in the film.
That isn’t why Montaigne makes me nervous, though. Its final moments seem to impart that neurosis trumps all, that no matter how neurotic your desire for something is, and no matter how neurotic your behavior, the something you desire can and should be yours. Thus the silly, fretful concert pianist gets what he wants, and so does the self-absorbed, hysterical actress hankering to play Simone de Beauvoir in a movie. Is this really the happy denouement Thompson wants?
But don’t get me wrong. For all this, Montaigne is enjoyable. It has no plot and yet it’s interesting. It is airy and sweet and enticingly acted. It’s arrantly, lovingly Parisian too. Just don’t expect the great French novelists with their classic French society.
(In French with English subtitles.)
Cover of Avenue Montaigne
by Dean | Sep 8, 2018 | General
Adapted from a novel, Paris Blues (1961) is an American film set in Paris and slightly influenced by European cinema, but still very conventionally made.
It concerns the lives and loves of two American jazz musicians, one white (Paul Newman) the other black (Sidney Poitier), living in the French capital. Newman, Poitier, Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll all maintain memorable presence; all give solid, often warmly pleasing, performances. There is good music with Louis Armstrong on hand, but the film’s dialogue is usually unremarkable, even obtuse. Still, it’s a not-great but not-bad effort by none other than Martin Ritt (Hud, Norma Rae). You’ll like the actors, and there is chemistry between the lovers.
