“This Gun For Hire” — This Movie For Viewing

by Dean | Jun 6, 2016 | General

Cover via Amazon

I’ve never read any of Graham Greene’s “entertainments,” as opposed to his serious novels, but the 1942 This Gun for Hire smacks of a good adaptation.

Alan Ladd is in it, and he ain’t no Shane:  he’s an icy killer (suitably acted), while Veronica Lake rightly holds down the iciness she displayed in Sullivan’s Travels.  This is her vehicle; with groundedness and class she enacts a singing magician (!) recruited for a righteous cause.  I liked her chemistry with Robert Preston. . . Director Frank Tuttle is uneasy with action scenes, but not, apparently, with actors.  All the same, the movie is entertaining.

The Schlub Is The Rub: The Movie, “Sideways”

by Dean | Jun 2, 2016 | General

Cover of Sideways [Blu-ray]

An absorbing comedy-drama, piercing and droll, it points up the theme of when the development of liaisons with other people is not matched by moral development, the manifestation of character.  These liaisons, these love affairs, are strongly desired, but are guardedly or hastily formed by men who are boys, i.e. Miles and Jack.  A boy, even so, can see himself as a loser, as Miles does, and so we sympathize.

“Skirt Day” Pulls No Punches About French Society

by Dean | May 31, 2016 | General

The France wherein jihadists have slaughtered innocents is the France of the 2008 film, Skirt Day—a scathing picture indeed.

Here, Sonia, a public high school teacher who often wears skirts, is trying to teach a drama course to wild, disrespectful immigrant kids from Muslim backgrounds.  (They hate skirts.)  Astonished to find that a thuggish African boy has a pistol in his possession, Sonia grabs it and is badly bullied for her trouble.  Now in shock—and feeling vindictive—she unintentionally shoots the boy in the leg and takes the students hostage, though only with the aim of delivering this day’s school lesson.  A police detective, Labouret, is sent to investigate and remedy the situation.  Sonia’s estranged husband, too, arrives at the school, enraged at the principal who has long failed to adequately help Sonia with discipline problems.

The film tells us that Muslim boys have learned to be misogynistic, and even misogynistic criminals.  They also use the word “kike.”  French society here is choking on its racial-ethnic insanity but, what is more, it witnesses the awful weakening of the institutions of school and marriage—and of French customs.  The result is that people feel deracinated and fretful.  Labouret, for example, understands that his marriage is at an end.  Personal angst is running high.

The director-writer is Jean-Paul Lilienfeld (talented), the actress who plays Sonia is Isabelle Adjani (talented—and superlative here).  The film’s climax is not that good, but everything else is dramatically skillful and unspeakably provocative, with a sprinkling of bitter humor.  Skirt Day may be the most politically honest and disturbing French artwork since The Camp of the Saints.

(In French with English subtitles)

La journée de la jupe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 50s Were Fellini’s Decade: “Il Bidone”

by Dean | May 29, 2016 | General

Il bidone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Il Bidone (The Swindler) is a notable Federico Fellini film from 1955.

Broderick Crawford stars as a member of a trio of crooks, cheating people out of their money in less than prosperous Italian towns.  The Crawford character is forty-eight years old and has a daughter he rarely sees, and, as critic Vernon Young pointed out, he is “a lonely swindler” (my italics).  Plus, because of his conscience, he is running out of steam, but not yet ready to let go of degeneracy.  Not at all.

Albeit not a great Fellini movie, Il Bidone is truthful and pretty incisive.  A little less humanistic than, say, I Vitelloni and Nights of Cabiria (man, thou art vile), it also presents fewer circus-and-Catholicism motifs than those pics.  Seeing Giulietta Masina, a Fellini regular (and ex-wife), in this movie nicely erased my memory of her in the last F.F. movie I saw her in: the terrible Juliet of the Spirits. 

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Poor Burt: “Starting Over” (1979)

by Dean | May 26, 2016 | General

Film poster for Starting Over – Copyright 1979, Paramount Pictures (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What might be a decent novel is, here, an unsatisfying film.  The script is wobbly, and the strikingly handsome Burt Reynolds, with his star quality, is miscast as an ordinary, somewhat less-than-virile gent.

Starting Over (1979) does effectively focus, though, on the internal psychological ping-pong experienced by divorced and recently unattached people.

Directed by Alan J. Pakula.