by Dean | Dec 21, 2016 | General
Vivacious Lady (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The premise for the George Stevens comedy, Vivacious Lady (1938), is that a botany professor (James Stewart) hastily marries an amiable nightclub performer (Ginger Rogers), but runs into sundry difficulties in trying to inform his father about it. The scenario is by P.J. Wolfson and Ernest Pagano, who should have made it funnier than it is, albeit they did zero in on the subject of inconsiderate behavior in marriage. Vivacious Lady isn’t boring, but in my view the story fails to really gel.
Although there is nothing wrong with Stevens’s sensible directing, the man who made A Place in the Sun and Shane had yet to emerge in ’38.
by Dean | Dec 19, 2016 | General
Bob Rafelson‘s The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) concerns the busting-up of foolish dreams in a country of runaway commercialism and fading respectable culture. (Why, there’s even troilism in the culture now, leading to fatal sexual jealousy!) It also presents the theme of an individual’s tragic non-control of events in another person’s life. Thus we have a deeply serious film here, but, sadly, one with a third-rate screenplay by Jacob Brackman.
Cover of The King of Marvin Gardens
Almost as bad is that Rafelson’s direction, besides being pretentious, is rather too imitative of Fellini and Antonioni, something not true of the filmmaker’s Five Easy Pieces. Still, a few very pleasant scenes and images show up, to which it should be added that one man and one woman—Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn—perform their roles suitably. Jack Nicholson and Julia Anne Robinson do not.
by Dean | Dec 19, 2016 | General
There is quite a wrinkle in the old Western, The Texas Rangers (1936), in that the two principal characters who join the famous Rangers are fakers—stagecoach robbers hiding out in the organization. Fred MacMurray is one of them, jocular Jack Oakie is another; but as time goes on, both of them reform, and remain Rangers.
The let’s-roll adventures begin early: wild Indians entrap the motley lawmen, and later MacMurray, though still unscrupulous, forces a murdering kingpin to be tried. At this point scriptwriter Louis Stevens keeps up the captivating work by having one of MacMurray’s buddies, a fellow stagecoach robber (Lloyd Nolan), save MacMurray’s life by shooting down two men who want to kill him. Nolan’s character, even so, is bad news. In The Texas Rangers, an antihero, MacMurray, becomes a hero (also, it seems that all along he’s a believer in God) while his buddy, Nolan, is a heavy who gets morally worse.
All of it is enjoyable enough to possibly make Rangers one of director King Vidor‘s best films. The pacing is good, the principal acting—well—not bad. MacMurray’s love interest is a young Jean Arthur, spunky and looking like Claudette Colbert.
by Dean | Dec 13, 2016 | General
Cover of Clean
Clean, the engrossing 2003 picture by Olivier Assayas, stretches from Canada to Western Europe, and from heroin to methadone to “clean.”
Maggie Cheung gets jailed in Canada for possession, then moves to Paris to beat her addiction. Plus she wants to see her young son in London. It’s all very hard. Cheung’s recovering addict is a stumbling bisexual and would-be Deborah Harry (another former addict), living with humiliation. Speaking now in French, now in English, Maggie’s acting is outstanding, full of depth. She and director-writer Assayas were married but got divorced during the filming of Clean, and Cheung is not in good spirits. Sad. There are some things just as lamentable as drug addition.
by Dean | Dec 6, 2016 | General
Oliver (David Suchet) is a laid-off IBM technician, and he is homeless. Every day is Sunday for such a man; he has no job to go to. On one particular Sunday, he meets Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), a little-known actress separated from her husband. After Madeleine mistakes Oliver for a movie director, the two talk and then engage in sex, which—count on it—will never happen again. They realize that what has developed is a charade.
Jonathan Rossiter‘s characters in Sunday (1997) are bereft. The film is nonchalantly concerned to show us what would be rightly considered beside the point, as the copulation in the hallway between Madeleine and Oliver turns out to be. Likewise with the activities of the men from the homeless shelter (again: bereft) where Oliver is staying. Like Oliver, they’re inescapably wasting their time.
A poetic American indie, Sunday is sad but, because it’s also amusing, not quite a heartbreaker. There is more acumen than pathos. Rossiter provides some masterly direction, and Suchet and Harrow are distinguished. ‘Tain’t for children, though. Lisa Harrow gets stripped to an extent she never did in The Last Days of Chez Nous (the only other movie I’ve seen her in).
